Integrated microfluidics to discover efficient glucoamylase enzymes secreted by yeast

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Cells are ubiquitous and are now responsible for so many real-world applications related to health and to energy. In relation to energy, specifically biofuel production, cells are hosts that can produce enzymes that are typically used to break up sugars and be used for fermentation. However, a challenge is that these enzymes are expensive to use during the fermentation stages since they require large amounts due to their inefficiency to break down complex sugars (like starch) into simple sugars (like glucose). Glucoamylase is an enzyme of particular interest since this is the main enzyme that is responsible for breaking up starch into simple units of sugar (like glucose). In this proposal, two teams are joining forces (Shih lab from Concordia and Oeser lab from Lallemand) to develop new methodologies to discover a new glucoamylase enzymes that will be more efficient under fermentation conditions. They are going to develop a new 'lab-on-chip' tool that will be capable of scanning ~ 1000 enzymes per second which can lead to testing over a million of different glucoamylase enzymes in yeast cells in less than a day. Using this new tool, they will be able to find this new enzyme (produced by yeast) that will work efficiently under fermentation conditions and thereby reducing the costs that will be required for fermentation at Lallemand. Furthermore, this will help the Biofuel Business Unit at Lallemand as this will improve their ethanol production yield and ultimately moving forward to use ethanol (and other biofuels) as an alternative oil resource in Canada and elsewhere.