ConBioChem: Continuous bio-production of commodity chemicals

当前油价的暴跌不应让我们忽视这样一个事实：在未来，从大型喷气式飞机到玩具大象等所有东西所需的燃料和化学品的比例将不断增加，它们将需要来自可再生资源。这意味着发酵工业的巨大扩张，所需的制造工厂的成本将迅速变得难以承受。解决方案是从分批发酵（如一次生产一辆汽车）转变为连续发酵（如汽车生产线）。这一重大变化在工程生产微生物，以及在设计和控制它们运作的工业过程中提出了许多挑战。该项目旨在建立一个以综合方式应对所有这些挑战的管道。它将产生稳定和健壮的生产微生物，其中过程微生物的生长和它产生的工业产品的形成之间存在最佳平衡。新的微生物将在新的连续过程中被利用，并且过程控制将被开发出来，其中微生物因产生高水平的工业产品而得到营养的“奖励”。这种“激励控制”策略本身将有助于生产有机体的稳定。将对新工艺的环境影响进行评估，以确保它们比它们所取代的化学工艺更清洁、更环保。最后，将评估建造新工厂制造化学品的成本，以及运营成本，以确保新的连续生物制造过程将为英国公司带来利润。

The current slump in oil prices should not lead us to ignore the fact that, in the future, an ever-increasing proportion of the fuels and chemicals, required for everything from jumbo jets to toy elephants, will need to come from renewable resources. This means a huge expansion of the fermentation industry, and the cost of the required manufacturing plant will rapidly become unaffordable. The solution is to move from performing fermentations batchwise (like manufacturing cars one at a time) to continuous processes (like an automobile production line). This major change presents a number of challenges in engineering production microbes, and in designing and controlling the industrial processes in which they operate. This project aims to produce a pipeline that will meet all of these challenges in an integrative manner. It will result in stable and robust production microbes in which there is an optimal balance between the growth of the process microorganism and formation of the industrial product that it generates. The new microbes will be exploited in new continuous processes, and process controls will be developed in which the microbe is 'rewarded' with nutrients for generating high levels of the industrial product. Such a 'control by incentives' strategy will, in itself, contribute to the stability of the production organism. The environmental impacts of the new processes will be assessed to ensure that they are cleaner and greener than the chemical processes that they are replacing. Lastly, the costs of building new factories to manufacture the chemicals will be assessed, together with the costs of operating them, to ensure that the new continuous bio-manufacturing processes will be profitable for UK companies.