FURI | Fall 2020

Utilizing 13C Tracing to Determine Metabolic Pathways

Understanding the metabolic pathways by which carbon substrates are assimilated is an important quest in metabolic engineering. The first experiment was performed to analyze the assimilation paths for labeled and unlabeled glucose in E. coli strains engineered for ethanol biosynthesis. Results indicated production of labeled ethanol from the labeled substrate. The second experiment was performed to analyze the E. coli strains co-cultured, where one strain was specialized for glucose assimilation while another one for xylose. Both the strains were grown in different compartments of the same reactor. The analyzed data indicated that the glucose specialist strain could release CO2 which would then be assimilated in the xylose specialist strain, based on the labeling results.