Scaling up of renewable chemicals.

The transition of promising technologies for production of renewable chemicals from a laboratory scale to commercial scale is often difficult and expensive. As a result the timeframe estimated for commercialization is typically underestimated resulting in much slower penetration of these promising new methods and products into the chemical industries. The theme of 'sugar is the next oil' connects biological, chemical, and thermochemical conversions of renewable feedstocks to products that are drop-in replacements for petroleum derived chemicals or are new to market chemicals/materials.

Designer protein-based performance materials.

Repeat sequence protein polymer (RSPP) technology provides a platform to design and make protein-based performance polymers and represents the best nature has to offer. We report here that the RSPP platform is a novel approach to produce functional protein polymers that have both biomechanical and biofunctional blocks built into one molecule by design, using peptide motifs. We have shown that protein-based designer biopolymers can be made using recombinant DNA technology and fermentation and offer the ability to screen for desired properties utilizing the tremendous potential diversity of amino acid combinations.

New proteins in a materials world.

With the development of protein engineering, protein expression, and nano(bio)technologies, the ability to use 20 or more amino acids to design and produce genetically engineered protein materials is now possible. Proteins derived from natural sources offer one route for the production of new materials and many have been modified or formulated for improved performance. The development of synthetic polymer systems provides a second route to new materials: the concept of using a library of monomers and having the methods to precisely order them to design and produce a new polymer is a long-sought objective of polymer scientists.

Genomics to fluxomics and physiomics - pathway engineering.

Developments in microanalytical methods are enabling quantitative measurement of multiple metabolic fluxes and, in conjunction with transcript and proteomic profiling, are revolutionizing the ability of researchers to manipulate metabolism through pathway engineering in a variety of species. We review recent literature on the advances in genomics, proteomics, fluxomics and computational modeling focused on metabolic pathway engineering applications.