Sang Yup Lee

Butanol is an aliphatic saturated alcohol having the molecular formula of C(4)H(9)OH. Butanol can be used as an intermediate in chemical synthesis and as a solvent for a wide variety of chemical and textile industry applications. Moreover, butanol has been considered as a potential fuel or fuel additive. Biological production of butanol (with acetone and ethanol) was one of the largest industrial fermentation processes early in the 20th century. However, fermentative production of butanol had lo

Plastics, including poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), possess many desirable characteristics and thus are widely used in daily life. However, non-biodegradability, once thought to be an advantage offered by plastics, is causing major environmental problem. Recently, a PET-degrading bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, was identified and suggested for possible use in degradation and/or recycling of PET. However, the molecular mechanism of PET degradation is not known. Here we report the crystal str

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are polyesters of hydroxyalkanoates (HAs) synthesized by numerous bacteria as intracellular carbon and energy storage compounds and accumulated as granules in the cytoplasm of cells. More than 80 HAs have been detected as constituents of PHAs, which allows these thermoplastic materials to have various mechanical properties resembling hard crystalline polymer or elastic rubber depending on the incorporated monomer units. Even though PHAs have been recognized as good c

Widespread utilization of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) has caused a variety of environmental and health problems; thus, the enzymatic degradation of PET can be a promising solution. Although PETase from Ideonalla sakaiensis (IsPETase) has been reported to have the highest PET degradation activity under mild conditions of all PET-degrading enzymes reported to date, its low thermal stability limits its ability for efficient and practical enzymatic degradation of PET. Using the structural infor

Sustainable production of chemicals from renewable non-food biomass has become a promising alternative to overcome environmental issues caused by our heavy dependence on fossil resources. Systems metabolic engineering, which integrates traditional metabolic engineering with systems biology, synthetic biology, and evolutionary engineering, is enabling the development of microbial cell factories capable of efficiently producing a myriad of chemicals and materials including biofuels, bulk and fine

Bacteria of the order Actinomycetales are one of the most important sources of pharmacologically active and industrially relevant secondary metabolites. Unfortunately, many of them are still recalcitrant to genetic manipulation, which is a bottleneck for systematic metabolic engineering. To facilitate the genetic manipulation of actinomycetes, we developed a highly efficient CRISPR-Cas9 system to delete gene(s) or gene cluster(s), implement precise gene replacements, and reversibly control gene