Alcohol Dehydrogenases Deletion to Increase Yield of Isobutyrate

Additional contributor: Kechun Zhang (faculty mentor)Methacrylic acid is one of the most crucial chemical feedstocks in the material industry and there is a high quantity demand of methyl methacrylate (MMA) which is the ester form of methacrylic acid. Every year million tons of methyl methacrylate is produced to synthesize polymethyl metharylate (PMMA) which is a thermoplastic material and it is used as a light or shatter-resistant alternative to glass. Therefore, to come up with a method for producing methacrylic acid and methyl methacrylate becomes a popular topic of research in biosynthesis area. There are several traditional methods being used in the industry and the most common one is reacting acetone with hydrogen cyanide to generate acetone cyanohydrins and then treat it with sulfuric acid to form methyl methacrylate. However, because of side products and reaction condition, these two traditional methods require high quality of controlling harmful chemicals and hard to increase the yield of target product. What’s worse, the reactants are not renewable and emission will damage the environment. However, we have designed a new biosynthesis strategy to produce methacrylic acid. In this proposed work, glucose is converted to isobutyrate or 3-Hydroxyisobutyrate. By using oxidative dehydrogenation of isobutyrate and dehydration of hydroxyisobutyrate we could generate methacrylic acidThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)