A team of biochemists at UCLA have created a novel system of converting glucose into highly useful chemical compounds, such as those needed to create biofuels and pharmaceuticals. Previous research endeavors relied on using cells to convert sugar into desired compounds. This has been difficult to achieve because cells would rather use sugar for their own natural uses, such as building proteins and cell walls. The UCLA biochemists have recently developed a way to achieve the conversion of glucose into desired compounds- without using cells.
The research team, led by chemistry and biochemistry professor James Bowie, Ph.D., used an approach they call Synthetic Biochemistry that is able to convert sugar into many different chemical compounds without using the help of a cell. They were able to create particular chemical reactions by re-engineering enzymes to function in desired specific ways. (Image of Beta-D-Glucose courtesy of Benjah-bmm27 via Wikimedia Commons)
“The idea of synthetic biology is to redesign cells so they will take sugar and run it through a series of chemical steps to convert it into to a biofuel or a commodity chemical or a pharmaceutical,” explained Dr. Bowie. “However, that’s extremely difficult to do. The cell protests. It will take the sugar and do other things with it that you don’t want, like build cell walls, proteins and RNA molecules. The cell fights us the whole way.”
For their current approach, the UCLA team took two dozen enzymes from different combinations and concentrations and added them to a flask with glucose. Through this work in the flasks, the team was able to create enzymes and pathways that are not naturally occurring. The construction of these enzyme systems shows that the cell is not needed and biochemists have the ability to produce chemical compounds inside the lab.
“We want to do a particular set of chemical transformations — that’s all we want — so we decided to throw away the cells and just build the biochemical steps in a flask. We eliminate the annoying cell altogether,” explained Dr. Bowie.
Through more work, this process could be fine-tuned to successfully produce new products for industrial use, biofuels, and pharmaceuticals.
This study was published in April 2016 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
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