earticle

영어

With increasing environmental awareness and legislation, GS Caltex Corporation, one of the biggest petroleum and petrochemical companies in Korea, has extended its research to industrial biotechnology. In particular, the company is interested in the fermentative production of C4 alcohols, including n-butanol and 2,3-butanediol, because the both alcohols are industrially important chemicals and also can be used as fuel additives. We recently constructed a number of n-butanol over-producing recombinant Clostridium acetobutylicum strains by metabolic engineering. The heterogeneous expression of adh gene, encoding secondary alcohol dehydrogenase, in C. acetobutylicum successfully converted acetone into isopropanol, which is also well known a fuel additive. More recently, the company has started the research on 2,3-butanediol to be further converted into butadiene. Butadiene is mainly used as a raw material for the synthesis of synthetic rubber for manufacturing automotive tyre. We carried out a series of fermentations to evaluate the economic feasibility of the microbial production of 2,3-butanediol. The experimental results turn out that 2,3-butanediol can be produced at a productivity of more than 3.0 g/L/h with a yield of 0.45 g/g glucose. This work was supported by the Energy Efficiency & Resources of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning(KETEP) grant funded by the Korea government Ministry of Knowledge Economy.