Corn-stalk sugars feed new bacterial strain designed to make useful chemicals
Engineers have developed a strain of a common bacterial species that can feed exclusively on the three major sugars present in corn stalks. While the new multiple-sugar-consuming strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas putida is interesting in its own right, a new paper published in Nature Communications on July 29, 2026, outlines the broader implications of this project for the future of biomanufacturing.
The research team, led by bioengineers at the University of California San Diego, uncovered new insights into leveraging evolution to create novel strains of microbes that are highly adept at feeding on low-cost feedstocks like agricultural waste or even mixed plastics.
"Given the likelihood that some of the most economically viable biomanufacturing feedstocks of the future will be complex mixtures of different components, this work has far-reaching implications. With our automated culturing platform, we engineered, using evolution, a bacterial strain capable of taking up all three sugars found in corn stalks quickly and simultaneously," said Adam Feist, a bioengineering professor at UC San Diego and the senior author on the paper.
"We found that the key was evolving strains under a specific mixture of sugars that required complete consumption of all three sugars for the strain to outcompete other variants. This produced versatile generalist strains, rather than narrow specialists."
Generalists for messy feedstocks
Looking ahead, these versatile generalist strains of bacteria could be especially relevant for building tomorrow's biomanufacturing economy, which makes efficient use of low-cost feedstocks that are not highly uniform—like agricultural waste and mixed plastics.
Feist is the director of the Future Biomanufacturing Center at UC San Diego. To carry out this research, the team used the automated ALEbot (Adaptive Laboratory Evolution robot) platform that Feist and his team developed at UC San Diego. The team used the ALEbot to run multiple experiments in parallel around the clock for months. This allowed them to direct the evolution of these new strains of Pseudomonas putida.
From sugar uptake to pigment
The researchers started with a Pseudomonas strain that had previously been engineered to consume the three sugars commonly found in agricultural waste: glucose, xylose and arabinose. But this starting strain had not been sufficiently optimized to meet the efficiency demands of biomanufacturing, which is where the new work fits in.
The engineers went on to program this bacterial strain to produce a desirable molecule, indigoidine, a blue pigment used for dyeing clothing.
"We partnered with research teams across three U.S. national laboratories to bring the necessary expertise together. In this arrangement, we each contributed our unique skill sets to both develop useful biomanufacturing strains and lay the groundwork for additional applications," said Feist, a faculty member in the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Publication details
Sunghwa Woo et al, Simultaneous optimization of lignocellulosic sugar catabolism via systematic laboratory evolution under complex selection pressure, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75974-x
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Citation: Corn-stalk sugars feed new bacterial strain designed to make useful chemicals (2026, August 10) retrieved 10 August 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-08-corn-stalk-sugars-bacterial-strain.html
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