Himanshu Dhamankar MS

Reducing our dependence on these dwindling non-renewable resources requires us to figure out ways to convert biomass (as a renewable resource) not only into biofuels but also value-added biochemicals to serve as replacements for petrochemicals and to effectively complement biofuels in a biorefinery. A major limitation in converting biomass into specific desired products is the availability of conversion technologies. In the Prather Lab we address this challenge using an approach called ‘De novo pathway engineering’- the construction of novel pathways for the microbial synthesis of value-added products, combining partial natural pathways and exploiting naturally evolved enzymes and their promiscuity to catalyze reactions with non-natural substrates that allows us to expand the repertoire of microbially synthesized products beyond natural products (Dhamankar and Prather, 2011). We are particularly interested in constructing pathways in E. coli for molecules with no known natural biosynthetic routes