Integron and omics based acceleratation of industrial strain development

This project aims to provide a new set of enabling technologies which will create a step change in the speed and efficiency with which engineered microbes can be constructed for industrial application. This improvement will be achieved by combining novel methods to recombine genes within the genome of industrial organisms with advanced metabolomics techniques and direct screening methods to identify strains with improved process efficiency. The project output will provide methods to overcome the normally time-consuming and laborious empirical process of iterative strain improvement. The initial application is to rapidly improve yeast strains used for bioethanol production but the suite of enabling tools being employed would be capable of accelerating the development of microbes for virtually any industrial application.