Lycopene Production in Dedicated Novel Chasses for Lignocellulosic Waste Material Utilisation Capable of Sustained Coculture

Abstract

Municipal solid waste (MSW) represents tonnes of material that, for the most part, is relegated to landfill. Synthetic biology proposes solutions to many of the challenges faced by humanity today, but many approaches are confined to use in classical chassis organisms. In MSW there are a variety of potentially toxic materials such as glues, dyes, and preservatives that could pose a challenge to its capitalisation when using these commonplace chassis. We have isolated a bank of strains that utilise paper and cardboard waste from a relevant waste environment. From these we have identified three strains that are capable of utilising cellulose as a sole carbon source. We have analysed how they utilise cellulose and hemicelluloses, both alone and in coculture. This revealed insights to how they might be used in synthetic consortia which were then produced under laboratory conditions. Production of complete genome sequences of these strains provides genetic insight to how these processes may be occurring at the metabolic level, and how they could be augmented using synthetic biology. To this end, we have produced protocols for transforming plasmids into these strains and have produced high value metabolites from this material.