Distinguished Speaker Seminar| Can biotechnology deliver cost effective liquid fuels from renewable feedstocks? by Professor Gregory Stephanopoulos

Biography:

Greg Stephanopoulos is the W.H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at MIT, and Instructor of Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School (1997-). He received his BS degree from the National Technical University of Athens, MS from the U. of Florida and PhD from the U. of Minnesota, all in Chemical Engineering. He taught at Caltech between 1978-85, after which he was appointed Professor of ChE at MIT. The primary focus of his research for the past 3 decades has been on metabolic engineering, the engineering of microbes for the production of fuels and chemicals. He has co-authored or –edited 5 books, more than 450 papers and 60 patents and supervised more than 140 graduate and post-doctoral students. He co-founded the journal Metabolic Engineering, and served as co-editor-in chiefand Editorial Board member of 10 scientific journals. He has also been on the Advisory Boards of 5 ChE departments. For his research and educational contributions, Prof. Stephanopoulos has been recognized with numerous awards, such as: Dreyfus award, Excellence in Teaching Award-Caltech, AIChE Technical Achievement Award, PYI from NSF, AIChE-FPBE Division Award, Marvin Johnson Award of ACS, Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering, the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of AIChE, Amgen Award in Biochemical Engineering. In 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and in 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (doctor technices honoris causa) by the Technical University of Denmark. In 2007 he won the C. Thom Award from SIM and the Founders Award from AIChE and in 2010 the ACS E. V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry and the George Washington Carver Award of BIO. In 2011 he was selected as the Eni Prize winner for Renewable and non-Conventional Energy and was also elected as Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens. He is an ASSS and AIChE Fellow. He was the 2014 recipient of the 2014 Walker award from AIChE. In 2013 he was awarded the John Fritz Medal of the American Association of Engineering Societies, in 2016 he won the Eric and Sheila Samson $1m Prime Minister Prize (Israel) and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Technical University of Athens and in 2017 we was recognized with the Novozymes Prize. In 2019 he was awarded an honorary degree from the Technical University of Dortmund and in 2023 was elected as member of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Stephanopoulos has served the professional organization of Chemical Engineers as chairman of Division 15, member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the AIChE Society for Biological Engineering. In 2014, he was elected as 2016 President of AIChE.

Professor Stephanopoulos has taught undergraduate and graduate courses of the core of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Caltech and MIT and co-authored the first textbook on Metabolic Engineering. He is presently directing a research group of approximately 15 researchers who work on applications of metabolic engineering for the production of natural products, fuels and chemicals.

The importance of liquid fuels in transportation is well established, yet, there are presently no viable options for their cost-effective production from renewable feedstocks.  During the past 15 years we have been developing in my lab a system for the conversion of gas mixtures of hydrogen (or CO) and CO₂ to oils or alkanes. The two-stage system comprises anaerobic fixation of CO₂ and conversion of the CO₂ fixation product (for example, acetate) to lipids, from which biodiesel can be produced. In another application, the CO₂ fixation product is converted to alkanes. Our work includes both the engineering of the microbes and development of a process to achieve gas to liquid conversion in prototype systems. These systems are scalable, make no use of land (beyond what is needed for generating renewable electricity for hydrogen production), do not compete with food and are cost competitive based on high level cost analysis. I will present the essential features of this process in my talk; full details can be found in the 5 papers cited.

References

1. Peng Hu, et al., “Integrated system for biological conversion of gaseous substrates to lipids,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201516867; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1516867113 (2016).
2. Jingyang Xu, et al., “Application of metabolic controls for maximization of lipid production in oleaginous yeast,” Proceed. of the National Academy of Sciences,114(27): E5308-E5316; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1703321114 (2017).
3. K.J. Qiao, et al., “Rewiring metabolism to maximize lipid production in Yarrowia lipolytica,” Nature Biotechnology, 35: 173-177; DOI: 10.1038/nbt.3763 (2017).
4. J.O. Park, et al, “Synergistic substrate co-feeding stimulates reductive metabolism,” Nature Metabolism, 1(6): 643–651; DOI: 10.1038/s42255-019-0077-0 (2019).
5. Li, Jingbo, et al., “Synthesis of High-Titer Alka(e)Nes in Yarrowia Lipolytica Is Enabled by a Discovered Mechanism.” Nature Communications, 11(1): 1-13.DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19995-0 (2020).

Selected for Editors’ Highlights: www.nature.com/collections/idhhgedgigand.

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