A novel pathway to produce butanol and isobutanol in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Paola Branduardi, Valeria Longo, Nadia Maria Berterame, Giorgia Rossi, Danilo Porro

The sustainable production of biofuels remains one of the major issues of the upcoming years. Among the number of most desirable molecules to be produced, butanol and isobutanol deserve a prominent place. They have superior liquid-fuel features in respect to ethanol. Particularly, butanol has similar properties to gasoline and thus it has the potential to be used as a substitute for gasoline in currently running engines. Clostridia are recognized as natural and good butanol producers and are employed in the industrial-scale production of solvents. Due to their complex metabolic characteristics and to the difficulty of performing genetic manipulations, in recent years the Clostridia butanol pathway was expressed in other microorganisms such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but in yeast the obtained results were not so promising. An alternative way for producing fusel alcohol is to exploit the degradation pathway of aminoacids released from protein hydrolysis, where proteins derive from exhausted microbial biomasses at the end of the fermentation processes.