Fuzhong Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, works with Synechocystis 6803 as well as other microbes and systems in the areas of synthetic biology, protein engineering and metabolic engineering, with special focus on synthetic control systems to make the organism reach its untapped prowess.
My goal is to engineer microbes and turn them into microfactories that produce useful chemicals, Zhang said. Synechocystis is particularly interesting because it can use CO2 as the only carbon source. Engineering this bacterium would turn the fixed CO2 into metabolites that can be further converted to fuels and other chemicals through designed biosynthetic pathways.