Project description
Industrial biotechnology for a sustainable chemical industry
The chemical industry, crucial to several industrial sectors, must transition to more sustainable practices. However, the sector’s significance means that novel solutions and technologies are needed for an efficient transition. Industrial biotechnology could offer a promising sustainable solution, but the limited range of enzyme classes currently in use restricts this potential. The EIC-funded W-BioCat project will introduce a novel enzyme class and develop the processes and technologies required to manufacture this enzyme cost-effectively and in sufficient quantities. The project will use these developments to convert oleic acid into oleyl oleate, an essential and widely used chemical.
Objective
Europe needs a sustainable chemical industry which will only be realized by new breakthrough technologies. Industrial biotechnology is established in chemical manufacturing, offering more efficient, more specific, safer and less energy demanding production, but is held back by the limited number of enzyme classes in industrial use. This project opens up an important new enzyme class of tungsten-containing enzymes (W-enzymes) which catalyse amazing chemical reactions involving challenging low redox potential reduction reactions, but are currently impossible to obtain economically and on scale to match industrial needs. We need to produce W-enzymes using an industrial workhorse micro-organism such as E. coli. Yet, we discovered that W-cofactor biosynthesis is the bottleneck preventing successful production of W-enzymes in E. coli. We can solve this challenge by using cutting-edge computational enzyme design approaches we recently developed, to create a completely new W-cofactor biosynthesis pathway for E. coli. The W-BioCat strains developed in this project will enable expression of new W-enzymes from genetic databases, and facilitate production of new engineered W-enzymes. The catalytic potential of these new W-enzymes will be established and implemented in new processes. Exciting new reaction scope in biocatalytic CO2 reduction to valuable chemicals and Birch reduction of aromatic compounds will be explored, alongside the already-established and broadly applicable carboxylic acid reductions. W-BioCat will be the breakthrough to make W-enzymes accessible for industry. As a proof of concept, a hydrogen-driven process to convert plant-derived oleic acid to the emollient ester oleyl oleate will be created. Oleyl oleate is used in many cosmetic products used daily by millions of people. This process will be demonstrated in multi-gram yield in scalable, industrially-relevant hydrogenation reactors, together with market research to address a pathway to commercialisation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysisbiocatalysis
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteinsenzymes
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2023-PATHFINDEROPEN-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
2628 CN Delft
Netherlands