Processing Catalytic Information in Bacteria

The work in this thesis aimed to take a critical step toward realizing cellular factories, which are the result of synthetic catalysts working alongside biocatalysts in microbes to perform tasks in unison. Such a concerted effort of synthetic chemistry and metabolic engineering should enable many exciting applications, ranging from the synthesis of value-added compounds from biomass to the targeted release of drugs in situ. Initially, we postulated that the identification of biocompatible synthetic catalysts and the improvement of biotechnologically-relevant enzymes would both benefit from an artificial connection between a (bio)catalyst's proficiency and an observable trait that is exclusive to living organisms. The work in this thesis demonstrates that that these two endeavors are indeed closely intertwined and can be approached in an analogous fashion by utilizing bacteria as a metric for catalytic activity.