ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΜΕΤΣΟΒΙΟ ΠΟΛΥΤΕΧΝΕΙΟ
Σχολή Χημικών Μηχανικών

Σεμινάριο

Ο ρόλος των Χημικών Μηχανικών στη Βιοτεχνολογία και άλλες αναδυόμενες τεχνολογίες

Γρηγόρης Στεφανόπουλος

Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT

Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Tετάρτη, 23/3/2016, ώρα 1:30 μμ
Αίθουσα "Κουμούτσου" Σχολής Χημικών Μηχανικών

Abstract
The most precious asset of a discipline is its intellectual core. It is developed after years of thoughtful analysis and interaction with industry, whose problems catalyze the emergence of the foundations of the discipline and fuel their advancement and maturation. The chemical engineering core is a particularly successful one as evidenced by its adoption by numerous new and emerging areas, such as Biotechnology. The latter is rapidly coming of age as enabling technology for the production of biobased chemicals and biofuels. In this task, it is aided by critical advancements in Metabolic Engineering that transforms microbes into little chemical factories capable of converting renewable feedstocks to a variety of products. At their core, both biotechnology and metabolic engineering are based on chemical engineering principles applied at the process equipment, as well as the cellular and molecular scales.
In this presentation I will review biotechnology and introduce metabolic engineering through an example from the engineering of oleaginous yeast for lipid synthesis and biodiesel production. I will present the design and execution of cell engineering through the lens of a chemical engineering. In that spirit, the capacity of candidate pathway must be assessed vis a vis alternative routes, thermodynamics and possible kinetic bottlenecks must be evaluated and the microbe performance tested in bioreactor environments.  These concepts and tools constitute the essence of metabolic engineering and they illustrate the application of the core of chemical engineering at the molecular, microbe and bioreactor scales. I believe that these tools will find increasing use as applications of biotechnology expand beyond the space of specialty products and into the domain of commodity chemicals that have been traditionally the realm of chemical process industry using fossil fuels as feedstocks. Properly trained chemical engineers will play a leading role in these developments.