Small Business ERC Collaborative Opportunity to Develop a Biomass Conversion to Fatty Acids Platform

NSF生物可再生化学品工程研究中心(CBiRC)的研究和开发工作已经确定了一种将糖转化为脂肪酸的生物过程作为平台技术。脂肪酸合成途径可以作为一个非常通用的平台来生产非常不同类别的化学品。由于需求上升和供应受限，目前脂肪酸是从棕榈油或椰子油中生产的。由于需求上升和供应受限，脂肪酸价格在过去十年中翻了两番，预计还会进一步上涨。拟议的努力将为各种生物质衍生脂肪酸及其衍生产品的商业化提供一个广阔的平台。这样的平台将迎合许多行业部门，包括消费品、营养、个人护理和基于脂肪酸碳链长度的聚合物。拟议的努力将侧重于C14和C16脂肪酸的商业化。Technology Holding LLC(小企业)和莱斯大学(CBiRC)合作开发了受专利保护的生物质转化为脂肪酸和脂肪酸衍生品的平台并将其商业化。拟议的方法利用正在申请专利的代谢工程大肠杆菌培养将C6糖从生物质转化为脂肪酸。代谢工程菌株表现出非常有希望的性能--这些菌株可以以接近最大理论值的脂肪酸/葡萄糖产量和良好的产量生产脂肪酸。拟议合作的目标是通过开发基于产量和市场价格的脂肪酸和衍生产品合成层次，将现有的ERC平台研究转化为市场。商业化工作的重点将是：(1)通过扩大规模展示受知识产权保护的基于脂肪酸的平台技术；(2)将基于脂肪酸的平台技术快速过渡到与CBiRC的翻译目标一致的市场；以及(3)从平台创建经济上可行的产品组合。

Research and development work at the NSF Engineering Research Center for biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC) has identified a bio-process for conversion of sugars to fatty acids as a platform technology. The fatty acid synthesis pathway can serve as an extremely versatile platform for the production of a very diverse class of chemicals. Due to rising demand and constrained supply, fatty acids are currently produced from palm or coconut oils. Due to rising demand and constrained supply, fatty acid prices have quadrupled in the last decade and are projected to rise further. The proposed effort will enable a broad platform for commercialization of various biomass-derived fatty acids and their derived products. Such a platform will cater to many industry sectors including consumer products, nutrition, personal care and polymers based upon carbon chain length of the fatty acids. The proposed effort will focus upon commercialization of C14 and C16 fatty acids. Technology Holding LLC (small business) and Rice University (CBiRC) have collaborated to develop and commercialize the patent-protected biomass conversion to fatty acids and fatty acid derivatives platform. The proposed process utilizes patent-pending metabolically engineered E. Coli culture to convert C6 sugars from biomass to fatty acids. The metabolically engineered strains have shown to exhibit extremely promising performance - these strains can produce fatty acids at a fatty acids/glucose yield close to the maximum theoretical value and at good production rate. The goal of the proposed collaboration is to translate the existing ERC platform research into the marketplace by developing a hierarchy of fatty acid and derivative products synthesis based upon yield and market price. The commercialization effort will focus upon: (1) Demonstrating the intellectual property protected fatty acid based platform technology via scale-up; (2) Rapidly transitioning the fatty acid based platform technology to the marketplace aligned with the translational goal of CBiRC and (3) Creating an economically viable product portfolio from the platform.