Integrated microfluidics to discover efficient glucoamylase enzymes secreted by yeast

细胞无处不在，现在负责许多与健康和能源有关的现实世界应用。在能源方面，特别是生物燃料生产方面，细胞是可以产生酶的宿主，这些酶通常用于分解糖并用于发酵。然而，一个挑战是，这些酶在发酵阶段使用成本很高，因为它们需要大量的酶，因为它们将复杂的糖(如淀粉)分解成单糖(如葡萄糖)的效率低下。糖淀粉酶是一种特别令人感兴趣的酶，因为它是负责将淀粉分解成简单的糖单位(如葡萄糖)的主要酶。在这项提案中，两个团队(Concordia的Shih实验室和Lallemand的Oeser实验室)联手开发新的方法，以发现一种在发酵条件下更有效的新糖淀粉酶。他们将开发一种新的芯片实验室工具，该工具将能够每秒扫描约1000种酶，这可以在不到一天的时间内测试酵母细胞中100多万种不同的糖淀粉酶。使用这一新工具，他们将能够找到这种新的酶(由酵母产生)，在发酵条件下高效工作，从而降低拉勒曼德发酵所需的成本。此外，这将有助于拉勒曼德的生物燃料业务部，因为这将提高他们的乙醇产量，并最终在加拿大和其他地方使用乙醇(和其他生物燃料)作为替代石油资源。

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.