Mekhi Williams
MIT Department: Chemical Engineering
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Kristala Prather
Research Supervisor: Sean Wirt
Undergraduate Institution: University of Delaware
Hometown: Bear, Delaware
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Mekhi Williams is a junior Chemical Engineering major with a minor in Biochemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He is conducting research focused on the yellow mealworm’s ability to digest plastic and its potential uses for bioprocessing. He aspires to go to graduate school for a PhD in synthetic biology research focusing on metabolic engineering. He wants to engineer the enzymatic pathways of cells to design green methods of creating products. He is currently working on such a project in the Prather lab at MIT, which seeks to use E. coli to create the bulk chemical aniline.
Abstract
Designing an Aniline Production Pathway in E. coli
Mekhi Williams1, Sean Wirt2, and Dr. Kristala L Jones Prather2
1Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware
2Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Aniline is a bulk chemical used as an intermediate in the production of dyes, pharmaceuticals,
pesticides, and other useful products. Current aniline production requires using the carcinogenic,petroleum-derived chemical benzene, which presents safety concerns above that of aniline and sustainability issues. Metabolic engineering presents a possible solution to this issue. Organisms can facilitate complex chemical reactions on organic matter using enzymatic pathways encoded by their genes. Such a pathway was proposed to produce aniline in bacteria, but it was not proven to work and lacked optimization for large-scale production. Thus, we sought to introduce the full aniline pathway into E. coli. Four recombinant genes were chemically transformed into E. coli and overexpressed for it to produce aniline from glucose as a feedstock. Expression of non-native enzymes was confirmed via SDS-PAGE analysis of cell lysates, and aniline production was analyzed using HPLC analysis of engineered cells grown with glucose. Aniline production was optimized by altering cell growth conditions such as induction timing and plasmid design by substituting homologous genes and confirming the function of the decarboxylase gene. By successfully designing a biosynthetic method for producing aniline, this high-use chemical can now be produced with mitigated safety and sustainability concerns.
