WEES Seminar Fall 2025:
Violeta Sànchez i Nogué
September 17
4:00 p.m.
Wagar 231

Abstract

Improving Cupriavidus Necator as Host for Conversion of Formic Acid

Multiple industries produce large amounts of waste CO2, and technologies exist whereby CO2 can be electrochemically reduced to formic acid, storing both carbon and energy as an atmospherically stable liquid. Cupriavidus necator H16, a soil bacterium capable of consuming and growing on formic acid as its sole carbon and energy source, is well positioned to upgrade CO2-derived formic acid into platform chemicals and fuel precursors. Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) has long been a powerful method for improving the performance of microbial strains under specific conditions without complete knowledge of their metabolism and physiology or tools to engineer them. The decreasing cost of genome resequencing has expanded ALE’s utility as a tool to elucidate genotype-phenotype relationships and identify useful metabolic engineering strategies.

In this talk, we will present our progress in using ALE-informed metabolic engineering to enhance the growth of Cupriavidus necator on formate and formic acid as its sole source of carbon and energy. Employing cultivation by serial transfer in tubes and continuous pH-stat bioreactors over hundreds of generations, we have generated and isolated strains exhibiting improved growth on formic acid, identified causative mutations by genome resequencing and genetic reconstitution. Ultimately, we have developed engineered strains of C. necator that exhibit significantly enhanced growth on formic acid and lend valuable insights into the factors important for growth on this substrate.
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Portrait of Violeta Sanchez i Nogue.

Biography

Violeta Sànchez i Nogué
Senior Staff Researcher
National Renewable Energy Lab

Violeta Sànchez i Nogué is a Senior Staff Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Her research focuses on developing bio-based process for the production of platform chemicals from biomass-derived sugars and other renewable and waste feedstocks using yeasts, bacteria, and microbial consortia. She earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2007, and a PhD in Engineering from the Division of Applied Microbiology at Lund University in 2013.