Abstract

Biosynthesized alkanes are promising candidates for drop-in replacement of petroleum. Our goal is to optimize the pathway of alkane synthesis and get high productivity. We picked out several key points in the pathway from glucose to various alkanes and generated a large number of strains with different productivity. In order to select out the ones with highest productivity, we designed a device named AlkFinder. The core of AlkFinder is a biosensor which can recognize sensitively alkane molecules within the cell and turn on the expression of downstream genes functioning as selection module. With AlkFinder, we managed to select the optimized genes of the pathway effectively and efficiently.