SBIR Phase II: Harnessing Untapped Food-borne Microbial Diversity to Rationally Engineer Novel Healthy Foods

这个小型企业创新（SBIR）第二阶段项目的更广泛影响是开发一种微生物发酵剂，使饮料制造商能够生产低糖，耐储存，不含酒精的发酵饮料。这解决了现有产品面临的紧迫挑战（例如红茶菌，它含糖量高，需要冷藏配送），并使饮料制造商能够用发酵和天然生产的版本取代不健康和人工生产的苏打水（市场超过400亿美元）。此外，该提案将开发设计新的微生物群落（多种微生物的联合体）的潜在能力，这些微生物群落可以共同工作，并且比最先进的单一菌株表现更好。这项技术在食品制造业中有着重要的应用，但在其他不同的垂直行业中也有重要的应用，如制造业、农业、制药、废物处理等。拟议项目将继续进行技术开发，并将一种可用于生产耐贮存、低糖发酵饮料的新型发酵剂商业化。将利用下一代宏基因组学和代谢组学方法建立和筛选一个大型食源性微生物菌株生物库。新的微生物群落组成将从一个大的设计空间中组装，测试和改进，依赖于新的生态设计和统计方法。这些社区将在口味、风味、发酵速度和弹性方面进行优化。最终的发酵剂候选者将在连续更大的发酵规模中得到改进和验证，这项工作的最终成果将是一种新型的冻干微生物发酵剂产品线，该产品线将被提供给商业饮料制造商并获得许可。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation (SBIR) Phase II project is to develop a microbial starter culture that allows beverage manufacturers to produce a low-sugar, shelf-stable, nonalcoholic fermented beverage. This solves urgent challenges with existing products (e.g. kombucha, which is high in sugar and requires refrigerated distribution) and enables beverage manufacturers to replace unhealthy and artificially produced sodas ($40B+ market) with fermented and naturally produced versions. In addition, this proposal will develop underlying capacities to design new microbial communities (consortia of multiple microbes) that can work together and perform better than state-of-the-art single strains. This technology has important applications across food manufacturing, but also in other disparate verticals, such as manufacturing, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, waste remediation and more. The proposed project will continue the technical development and commercialize a novel starter culture that can be used to produce a shelf-stable, low sugar fermented beverages. A large biobank of food-borne microbial strains will be generated and screened utilizing next-generation metagenomic and metabolomic approaches. Novel microbial community compositions will be assembled, tested and refined from a large design space, relying on new ecological design and statistical approaches. The communities will be optimized for taste, flavor and fermentation speed and resilience. Final starter culture candidates will be advanced and validated in successively larger fermentation scales, and the ultimately output of this work will be a novel lyophilized microbial starter culture product line that will be supplied and licensed to commercial beverage manufacturers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.