SBIR Phase I: Engineering Microbial Biosynthesis of a Non-caloric Natural Sweetener

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目将探讨合成生物学和代谢工程技术产生过量生产非热量天然甜味剂的微生物菌株的潜力。目前天然甜味剂的生产和利用受到限制，因为本地植物来源的种植和生产成本很高。因此，尽管天然甜味剂已被使用了数千年，并以其健康和无热量的特性而闻名，但其高昂的生产成本使其无法与饮料和碳酸软饮料中广泛使用的合成甜味剂直接竞争。我们的目标是开发一种用于生物合成生产的发酵工艺，以便在消费市场上更多地采用低卡路里的天然甜味剂。代谢工程方法将用于将天然生物合成途径从植物转移到细菌宿主，并在商业可行的水平上优化过剩生产的代谢通量。我们预计将获得一株高产菌株，适合继续商业化努力。总体而言，该项目如果成功，将为无热量天然甜味剂提供一条新的可持续生产路线。该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是开发一种以经济和可持续的方式生产无热量天然甜味剂的微生物工艺，具有潜在的30亿美元的全球市场。这种甜味剂的使用将改善口味特征，并扩大对低卡路里饮料、糖果、烘焙食品、乳制品等的采用，从而降低糖尿病和其他肥胖相关疾病的发生率，从而造福公众健康。这些好处将转化为美国和全球医疗成本的降低。此外，这项研究将开发可推广的合成生物学技术，用于大批量生产天然产品，并对人类健康和健康有许多应用。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address the potential of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering technologies to generate microbial strains over-producing a non-caloric natural sweetener. Current production and utilization of natural sweeteners is limited due to the high cost of the cultivation and production from native plant sources. So, although natural sweeteners have been used for thousands of years, and are known for their healthy and non-caloric properties, their high production cost prevents them from directly competing with synthetic sweeteners extensively used in beverages and carbonated soft drinks. Our objective is to develop a fermentation process for biosynthetic production allowing increased adoption of low-calorie, natural sweeteners in consumer markets. Metabolic engineering approaches will be used to transfer the natural biosynthetic pathway from the plant to a bacterial host and optimize the metabolic flux for the overproduction at a commercially viable level. We anticipate that a high-productivity strain will be obtained, suitable for continued commercialization efforts. Overall, this project, if successful, will provide a new sustainable production route to the non-caloric natural sweeteners.The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is the development of a microbial process for the economical and sustainable production of non-caloric natural sweetener, with a potential $3 billion global market. The use of this sweetener will improve taste profiles and expand adoption of low-calorie beverages, confectionaries, baked goods, dairy products, and so on, thus benefitting public health by reducing incidence of diabetes and other obesity-related diseases. Such benefits will translate to reduced healthcare cost both in the U.S. and globally. Additionally, this research will develop generalizable synthetic biology techniques for the high-volume production of natural products with many applications for human health and wellness.