After a period of dedicated efforts, collaboration, and significant achievements, the Smartbox project has officially come to its end. SMARTBOX partners developed a strong joint collaboration and created an open atmosphere for fruitful discussion so, that progress and innovation on the enzyme development as biocatalysis and the upscaling process can take place. SMARTBOX is following its dissemination and exploitation strategy, by reaching out to the scientific and industrial community with its news section on the project website, posts in social media and attendance to many conferences and events. The in-silico FRESCO computational method was applied successfully by partners to several oxidative enzymes to improve the stability of these enzymes and increase the resistance to co-solvents. In -silico computational method (FRESCO) created more thermostable variants of oxidative enzymes and is now part of the Zymvol bioinformatic toolbox. Within the first reporting period the first application turning HMF into FDCA, the best candidates resulted from an HMFO mutant library generated by computational design (ZYMVOL) and was screened by RUG. The industrial production up to 150L scale of enzymatic FDCA via bioconversion and its following purification steps was performed successfully by BBEPP, making the bio-based building block available at high polymer grade purity and in significant quantities. In the meantime, further work has progressed on the enzymatic synthesis of FDCA and DFF from HMF.
The selective production of specific lignin monomers through RCF was successfully performed at lab-scale and the first intermediates were send to partners for enzymatic conversion experiments. At the end of the project the Biocon pilot facility was opened in December 2023 by KU Leuven and the SELS Group. In the last period 3 more publications were accepted within the enzyme development working group authored by UniPavia, RUG, ITQB, Zymvol, UniPavia, and 1 joint publication with the intermediates WorkPackage with KUL as its lead partner. All 9 publications can be found open access on the project website. The framework of the sustainability and risk assessment with a common basis for the evaluation of the investigated SMARTBOX technologies were defined, including (i) the goal and scope definition, value chain definition with a short description of the processes, identification of boundaries for the different assessments and (ii) the description of the methodologies used for the LCA/ TEA. 2 reports on analysis of 2 value chains within SMARTBOX could be delivered within the project lifetime. These are of confidential nature. In order to highlight some faces behind the SMARTBOX Work Packages and its results the idea was to set-up short videos in which the project partner explain their role in the project and mention their outcomes and SMARTBOX's efforts. The videos has then been released one by one on the SMARTBOX LinkedIn account.
