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Lignocellulosic biomass serves as an abundant renewable carbon resource with significant potential
for sustainable biomanufacturing. However, the microbial conversion is limited by the high cost of enzyme
purification, lack of real-time metabolic feedback, and strain instability under prolonged cultivation. This talk
presents integrated strategies connecting secretion, sensing, and regulation within engineered microbial systems.
An extracellular cellulase secretion platform was developed in Escherichia coli to reduce downstream processing
demands and improve enzyme accessibility. Long-term cultivation, plasmid stability analysis, and adaptive
evolution on cellulose minimal media were used to assess the impact of secretion load on strain performance.
Our work also focuses on the construction of a CRISPRi based whole-cell glucose biosensor repurposing native
carbon catabolite repression to enable dynamic metabolic monitoring. Inversion of endogenous regulatory logic
allows tunable, low-burden reporting of intracellular glucose levels. Together, these approaches provide a
blueprint for the development of responsive and high-yielding microbial platforms for scalable, sustainable
bioprocessing. |