Chemical engineering professor teams with Department of Energy to investigate methane-eating microbe’s high-oxygen metabolic flip
Published: Feb 23, 2026 7:55 AM
By Joe McAdory
Jin Wang, the Walt and Virginia Woltosz Professor of chemical engineering, is principal investigator on a collaborative project with the DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.
Why does a methane‑consuming microbe flip into a hyper‑metabolic mode under high oxygen stress? Can the process be controlled — and if so, could that discovery help turn wasted methane into valuable products?
Jin Wang, the Walt and Virginia Woltosz Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, is looking for answers, and she’s partnering with a computational modeling team from the Department of Energy (DOE) to find them.
Wang is principal investigator of the project “Deciphering Oxidative Stress Induced Formate Overproduction in Methylomicrobium buryatense 5GB1 through Integrated Metabolic Modeling,” a collaboration with the DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).
Together, the team will integrate Wang’s experimental datasets and draft a genome-scale model into an improved understanding of cellular metabolism capable of pinpointing why Methylomicrobium buryatense 5GB1 produces an abundance of formate, a simple one‑carbon compound, under high oxygen levels — and reveal how that behavior might be harnessed for environmental or economic benefit.
Wang said that methane from landfills, coal mines, agricultural waste and residual gas at oil and gas wells is often produced in volumes too small for conventional chemical processing and is frequently flared or released into the atmosphere.
“If you think about if we could utilize the wasted methane, the ones emitted around the landfill… that not only removes the methane from the atmosphere, but also produce value,” she said.
Laboratory experiments revealed how dramatically Methylomicrobium buryatense 5GB1 responds to oxygen stress.
“When the oxygen input was switched from 20 percent to 80 percent, cells went through a formate overproduction phase where yield exceeded 50 percent,” Wang said. “Even after the cells stabilized under the higher oxygen level, the formate yield reduced to around 30 percent, which is still significantly higher than the formate yield under optimal growth.”
Rather than relying on genetic modification, Wang’s team observed the unusually high formate production as a natural response to environmental stress — producing at least 100 times more formate than what has been achieved through genetic modification alone.
“Most of the research has focused on genetic manipulation,” she said. “We found that if you manipulate the environmental pressures, sometimes you get a lot better response from the cells. If cells are already pushing the carbon toward this pathway, moving it forward is a lot better than forcing the cells to change their behavior.
“We have collected data on cell growth, transcriptomic and yield distribution, and we also have a draft genome scale model. But the understanding on the methanotroph (Methylomicrobium buryatense 5GB1) is limited.”
Enter the EMSL team. Their role is to apply advanced computational modeling to improve the genome-scale metabolic model so it can accurately simulate the microbe’s response to oxidative stress. Wang hopes the work will lead to improved understanding on the methanotroph’s metabolism and provide insight on potential metabolic knobs for genetic engineering targets.
“Once we understand the mechanism behind this shift, we can begin designing systems that intentionally direct carbon through the pathways we want,” she said. “That moves us from simply observing the behavior to being able to predict and control it.”
Media Contact: , jem0040@auburn.edu, 334.844.3447