Synthetic and Systems Biology Approach towards Designing Metabolic Bypass and Identifying Novel Enzymes for Cholesterol Lowering Drug Precursor (BTO) Biosynthesis from Crude Glycerol

1, 2, 4-Butanetriol (BTO) is a potential precursor of Cholesterol Lowering Drugs. BTO production is predominantly dependent on chemical conversions at present. Biological route for BTO biosynthesis suffers due to multiple issues like unavailability of efficient biosynthetic pathways, inefficient enzymes, usage of expensive edible feedstock and unavailability of suitable chassis host strains. These issues practically restrict its large scale bio-industrial productions considering lower molar yield, titer and productivity of BTO via biosynthetic route. The main aim of this study is to find out efficient novel biosynthetic pathways which can convert non-edible feedstock (crude glycerol from biodiesel waste) towards BTO biosynthesis. The second aim of this study is to identify putative non-natural enzyme classes predicted to be involved in these biosynthetic pathways. Future perspective will be to functionalize these pathways towards In-vivo validation within suitable metabolically engineered microorganisms for improving BTO biosynthesis.