DTU BioBuilders 2021 - Presentation Video of PHEAST

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. The UN Sustainable Development Goals clearly emphasize the immediate need to combat climate changes to promote sustainability. Our project, PHEAST, endeavored to design and test an engineered cell factory in yeast to use methane as a feedstock. We used Komagataella phaffii (previously P. pastoris), a methylotrophic yeast, to engineer this cell-factory since it has been used extensively in industrial protein production due to its high protein-secretion as well as ease of protein purification. To make the cell factory effectively use methane as a carbon source, recombinant pMMO subunits were incorporated from a natural methanotrophic bacteria, M. capsulatus. This way, methane is converted to methanol and K. phaffii can further use its native metabolic pathway to produce protein of interest. In the future, we believe this project will open the arena to produce many proteins of interest using this engineered, methane-consuming cell-factory.