The effect of greenhouse gases on the environment has been well documented. In effort to mitigate the addition of greenhouse gases to the environment, there has been a collective effort to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. One of the many ways to reduce this dependency is to find alternative methods for producing high-valued chemicals that are currently derived from fossil fuels. Due to the increasing bioengineering tools made available, this branch of science has greatly evolved and has facilitated the production of different high-valued chemical commodities in model organisms such as Escherichia coli or Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
However, a great barrier to commercialization of these high-valued bioproducts is their high production cost. Thus, in this thesis we focus on reducing the cost of the carbon feedstock by engineering yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to utilize methanol instead of glucose, the preferred but expensive carbon source. A three gene pathway found in Bacillus methanolicus was introduced in a strain of S. cerevisiae, enabling it to assimilate methanol. Overall, we were able to engineer S. cerevisiae to assimilate methanol and observed a 13.54% increase in biomass synthesis in the presence of 5mM methanol. We show the ability of our engineered strains to convert methanol to amino acids using 13C-labeled methanol. As well, we show a 2.2 to 3.7-fold increase in 13C-labeled amino acids when the media was supplemented with yeast extract.