There is a strong need to develop cost-effective, sustainable and low-environmental-impact technologies in order to promote the switch from a petrol refinery model to an integrated, carbon neutral biorefinery model. Lignocellulosic biomass, a renewable source to generate more than 200 value-added compounds, holds a huge potential for biorefinery industry. However, the complex polymer layout of such feedstock hampers the cost effectiveness of polymers extraction and their further conversion. Genetic engineering of this lignocellulosic biomass could benefit biorefinery transformation chains by lowering economic and technological barriers to industrial processing but previous efforts have mostly targeted the major constituents of woody biomass: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Here we proposed a unique invention allows the integration of a new polymer (callose) into wood biomass by genetic engineering, and increases the conversion efficiency into simple sugars up to 90%, predicting strong improvements of biorefinery processes and industry profit margins
The current innovation is protected by a patent, and the core objectives of APPLICAL lay in the innovation validation in an industrial setting in order to shape further our intellectual property and commercialization strategy. However, those initial objectives have met significant drawbacks with the COVID 19 pandemic, and delayed the outcomes to such testing to the late quarter of 2022. Nonetheless, contingency measures were adopted in parallel to assess new innovation routes for our genetically engineered wood in the biomaterial field, and the ERC PoC funding was pivotal in this assessment. Initial results of such parallel testing improved greatly our comprehension of the impact of extra polymers addition on lignocellulosic biomass, and unravelled strong potential to use genetically engineered trees for innovative wood based biomaterials such as nano-cellulose and delignified wood. Such results are currently under revision in a high visibility scientific journal and we are currently assessing the need to extend the initial intellectual property towards new application routes. Altogether, the APPLICAL funding was paramount in the assessment of our innovation for specific biorefinery transformation chains but also allowed to explore new applications routes that may lead to a change of paradigm in the way we think the future of biomass engineering.
