In the past decade, the demand for food ingredients from sustainable sources have been gaining momentum. Gradual replacement of artificial ingredients is becoming a strong driver among large companies in an attempt to improve consumer satisfaction. In 2015, a cluster of food brands led by Nestlé vowed to use only natural ingredients in products marketed in North America. Moreover, it becomes clear that natural resources used in these industrial sectors are often limited and climate dependent, leading to price fluctuations. In this and other fields, there is thus a strong industrial commitment towards the replacement of traditional techniques for product synthesis, such as petrochemical transformation or devoting large areas of arable land to grow plants with low yields of the target compounds, while fostering a paradigm shift towards more sustainable biotechnologies.
However, to support this significant market trend, it is important to develop scalable technologies that can offer efficient biological processes for compounds that can be scaled-up respecting environmental and social aspects. In many cases where the chemical synthesis has been put in place, the complexity of the molecules leads to prices that, although lower than most of the ones associated with natural products, are still within the same order of magnitude.
Combining the latest advances on synthetic biology, systems biology and rapid prototyping the project SHIKIFACTORY100 seeks the rapid and cost-effective development of biological alternatives, which can be used to create resource-efficient and cost-effective microbial processes for the production of novel compounds or compounds that are currently only produced by petrochemical processes or limited to plant extraction.
The overall objective of SHIKIFACTORY100 is empowering cost-effective synthesis of >100 compounds derived from shikimate to expand diversity of nature's chemical production. This project proposes a complete pipeline taking advantage of emerging synthetic biology and rapid prototyping techniques combined with knowledge of synthetic chemistry, enzyme engineering, systems biology and bioinformatics.
The main technical objectives (vectors) of the project are (Figure 1):
● DISCOVERY - Collection of natural and non-natural reactions and compounds as well as the discovery and ranking of novel pathways for the production of the target compounds.
● DESIGN - In silico and in vivo design, rapid prototyping for the pathways selected in the previous vector and optimization efforts toward chassis and advancing production strains.
● APPLICATION - Application and initial upscaling for a subset of compounds and sustainability appraisal.
