 Hi. Thanks for listening. My name is Tim Whitehead. I'm an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University. And to my right here is Kyle Tomak, who's the lead author on a paper recently accepted by Biotechnology and Bioengineering entitled Removal and Upgrading of Lignosyloelastic Fermentation Inhibitors by Institute Biocatalysis and Liquid-Liquid Extraction. Okay, so as many of you know, Lignosyloelastic biomass contains fermentation inhibitors which are released by biomass pretreatment and hydrolysis. Delute substrate streams have been necessary to efficiently convert this biomass to valuable products. Right. Thanks, Kyle. And to overcome this, the substrate streams necessitate dilute final product hiders. To increase those product hiders, strain engineering has historically been done in the last half dozen years. Really new strain engineering recombinering techniques, et cetera, have been utilized to really overcome this problem. While some really dramatic and successful advances have been made by other research groups, in general, this is still an unsolved problem. One of the big stumbling blocks is a class of these fermentation inhibitors known as the hydroxycinamic acids. These are molecules that are phenolics with carboxylic acid moiety, and they are toxic to most fermentative microbes. And so what we show in this work is a general concept of combining a catabolic pathway to destroy these hydroxycinamic acids, combined with a liquid-liquid extraction approach to remove the hydrophobic products from the obvious fermentation broth to improve fermentation characteristics. Okay. So first, we quantify the toxicity of these hydroxycinamic acids in their decarboxylation products. So we compared ferulic acid and borobonogliacol, and we put them into minimal media to simulate fermentation conditions. And we tested E. coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and it was determined that borobonogliacol was more toxic to microbial growth. Organic solvents were then screened for their ability to preferentially extract these hydroxycinamic acid decarboxylation products without affecting microbial growth or ethanol concentration. So partition coefficients were calculated in growth rates obtained to quantify these parameters with tetradocaine, meaning our specifications. An active phenolic acid decarboxylase was expressed in E. coli and grown in de-simulated fermentation conditions, and maximum E. coli growth rates in the presence of ferulic acid were only observed with the addition of tetradocaine. Great. Thanks, Kyle. And what this shows is just a really cool approach combining metabolic engineering or strain engineering techniques with really classical bioprocess engineering. This introduction of a co-solving stream to remove toxic products is certainly not new. This is pioneered by work done by Harvey Blanche in the 80s, among other researchers for sure. And what we expect to see is that there are similar contributions in future years that combine these classical bioprocess engineering techniques along with more advanced metabolic engineering concepts. Before we leave, I'd just like to make a plug. We have deposited all the plasmids resulting from this work in a plasmid repository called AdGene, which you can find this online at adgene.org. And this is freely available for academic users, and we encourage other researchers to do likewise. With that, Kyle and I would just like to say thanks for listening, and thanks again. Bye.