Re-shaping gateways for selective recycling of valuable chemical compounds and for microbial cell factories

Fair and responsible use of the world’s limited resources requires substantially improved recycling capacity and substitution of oil-based precursors with products from metabolically engineered microbial cells. This includes extensive amounts of valuable, small organic molecules that we presently waste through emission to the environment. To simplify purification of small molecules produced by metabolic engineering, we need to export these in a selective way to the growth medium. To solve these two problems, we will use membrane-embedded aquaporin water channel structures as framework for directed evolution to select variants with “on-demand” flux specificity, meaning we will start with the chemical compound we want to purify and subsequently select an aquaporin variant that selectively fluxes the desired chemical.