Cellulect: A Synthetic Biology Platform for the Optimization of Enzymatic Biomass Processing

人们普遍认为，人类必须转向可持续的制造方式，这将使我们有必要采用来自植物基材料（称为生物质）的化学原料。其目标是将目前作为农业废弃物的生物质（如秸秆）转化为糖，然后用于制造有用的产品。我们建议开发一个“前端”，以优化生物质向糖的转化。这项技术可以被固定在生物炼制厂的任何“后端”，以生产从生物燃料到生物塑料等任何东西。通过创造一种快速调整细菌或真菌以实现最佳生物质转化的技术，我们坚持多样化的原料生物质原料的范围，可以有效地利用。本文提出的工作创造了一种新的技术，生物质原料进行筛选，对库的酶以确定哪种基因组合给出最佳的生物质降解。然后，这些组合可以用作起点，以在进化过程中生成进一步的组合。这将在提高生物质转化为可用原料的产率方面为用户创造价值。除了能够针对任何给定应用优化酶混合物外，对结果的分析将使团队能够开发生物学，这将有助于未来生物质加工系统的合理设计，并将导致对生物质降解过程的更深入了解。开发的技术将由我们的商业团队成员提供给市场，有许多途径来提取价值，包括：i.）生物制造大量的酶混合物，作为细胞裂解物或提取物直接销售给生物炼制操作员。（二）或者，克隆本身可以出售给客户，以产生他们自己的酶。我们预计这将涉及一项许可协议。（三）为客户提供合同服务，客户希望为他们感兴趣的特定生物质实施定制的消化底盘;可能涉及某种形式的菌株维护和进一步的修改。

It is widely recognised that humankind must move to sustainable ways of manufacturing and that this will necessitate our adoption of chemical feedstocks derived from plant-based material known as biomass. The goal is to allow biomass which is currently a waste product of farming, like straw, to be converted into sugars and then used to manufacture useful products. We propose to develop a "front-end" to optimise the conversion of biomass to sugars. This technology may be bolted to any "back-end" in a biorefinery to produce anything from biofuels to bioplastics and so on. By creating a technology for the rapid tuning of a bacteria or fungus for the best biomass conversion, we stand to diversify the range of raw biomass feedstocks which may be exploited efficiently.The work proposed herein creates a novel technology for biomass feedstock to be screened against a library of enzymes to determine which gene combinations give the optimal biomass degradation. These combinations may then be used as a starting point to generate further combinations in an evolutionary process. This will create value for the user in terms of improvements in the yield of biomass conversion to useable feedstock.In addition to enabling the optimisation of enzyme blends for any given application, analysis of the results will allow the team to develop heuristics which will facilitate rational design of biomass processing systems in the future, and will lead to a deeper understanding of biomass degradation processes.The technology developed will be offered to the marketplace by our commercial team members, Ingenza Ltd. There are a number of routes to value extraction including: i.) Biomanufacture of bulk quantities of the enzyme blend for sale direct to biorefinery operators as cell lysate or extract. ii.) Alternatively, the clone itself could be sold to a customer, to generate their own enzymes. We anticipate that this would involve a licensing agreement. iii.) Provision of a contract service to customers wishing to have a bespoke digestion chassis implemented for the particular biomass of interest to them; probably involving some form of strain maintenance and further modification as required.