Synthetic biology turns E. coli into a methylotroph

The team of James C. LIAO at the Institute of Biological Chemistry of Academica Sinica in Taipei, Republic of China, has reprogrammed E. coli using metabolic robustness criteria followed by laboratory evolution to establish a strain that can efficiently utilize methanol as the sole carbon source and grows to high cell density at a rate comparable with natural methylotrophs in a wide range of methanol concentrations. LIAO is Professor emeritus of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.07.010