Jay Keasling

Reasearch Focus: Metabolic engineering of microorganisms

The mission of the research in the Keasling Laboratory is to develop foundational tools for engineering metabolism inside cells and to use those tools to solve important societal problems. We have created a variety of tools for regulating metabolic pathways inside cells, novel metabolic pathways to produce unnatural molecules, and robust microbial hosts for producing chemicals under a variety of industrial conditions. We have used these tools to produce the antimalarial drug artemisinin, a variety of commodity and specialty chemicals, and biofuels.