Engineering

Microbial production of value-added chemicals derived from fatty acids is a sustainable alternative to petroleum-derived chemicals and unsustainable lipids from animals and plants. Fatty acids with different carbon chain lengths including short- (C6), medium- (C6-C12), long- (C14-C20), and very-long- (C20), with either even or odd number of carbons, have significantly different characteristics and wide applications in energy, material, medicine, and nutrition. Tailoring chain-length specificity of these compounds using metabolic engineering would be of high interest.