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

这个小企业创新（SBIR）二期项目的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、货架稳定、不含酒精的发酵饮料。这解决了现有产品面临的紧迫挑战（例如含糖量高、需要冷藏配送的康普茶），并使饮料制造商能够用发酵和自然生产的苏打水取代不健康的人工生产苏打水（市场价值400多亿美元）。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一起工作，并且比最先进的单一菌株表现更好。这项技术在整个食品制造领域都有重要的应用，但也在其他不同的垂直领域，如制造业、农业、制药、废物修复等。拟议的项目将继续技术开发和商业化一种新型发酵剂，可用于生产货架稳定的低糖发酵饮料。利用下一代宏基因组学和代谢组学方法，将产生和筛选大型食源性微生物菌株生物库。依靠新的生态设计和统计方法，新的微生物群落组成将在一个大的设计空间中进行组装、测试和提炼。这些群落将在味道、风味、发酵速度和恢复力方面进行优化。最终的候选发酵剂将在更大的发酵规模中进行推进和验证，这项工作的最终成果将是一种新的冻干微生物发酵剂生产线，该生产线将供应给商业饮料制造商并获得许可。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

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.