Kevin Yeung ’23, Chemical and Biological Engineering

Kevin Yeung ’23

Major

Chemical and Biological Engineering

Project Title

Case Studies of Yeast8 as a Genome-scale Model and Its Proof-of-concept Applications

Presentation Link

View Kevin's Presentation

Certificate(s): Engineering Biology, Language and Culture

I sought to develop the metabolic engineering of yeast into a sustainable method of producing 1-propanol, an important precursor of commercial plastics that is currently sourced from petrol. I relied on a publicly available genome-scale model of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which consists of all the reactions and genes that dictate the organism’s metabolism, to simulate its growth. I used MATLAB software to introduce synthetic pathways into the metabolic network of yeast and found viable in silico strains that are able to anaerobically generate 1-propanol with glucose as a carbon substrate. In addition, I improved the titer and yield of these strains with an algorithm that searches for and knocks out the genes that encode for reaction catalyzing enzymes that compete with propanol production. Some of these genes have been previously identified and confirm the validity of the model, while others have not been considered before. I intend to implement these results into live laboratory strains to investigate the accuracy of these computational predictions. This internship taught me the power of modeling biological systems mathematically, and I hope to integrate this knowledge into future academic endeavors.