Waste Stream Valorisation: Solving sustainable chemical production

Industrial chemical production is reliant on fossil fuel feed stocks and processes, which are unsustainable with a devastating effect on the climate. Bio-based production represents a promising alternative, where sustainable carbon sources and engineered microorganisms can be used to produce a wide variety of commodity chemicals. This project aims to develop a pipeline to drastically decrease the time and costs to create bacterial strains capable of producing the chemicals we need.

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing biobased solutions is the cost of feedstocks used for bacterial growth and production of chemicals. This project will exemplify the use of alternative carbon sources, generate consistent feedstocks from waste streams and develop new ways of using high-potential, under-utilised carbon streams to accelerate the switch to global sustainability.

Objectives

1. Identifying the chassis:

Investigating common E.coli production strains for their ability to use advantaged carbon sources. In parallel a comparable analysis of strains of E. coli already adapted to alternative carbon sources will be carried out.

2. Identifying waste streams

An initial techno-economic analysis will be carried out on a selection of Agricultural/highly heterogeneous waste streams. After which viable waste streams will be fed into the platform for chassis selection and tested.

3. Chassis engineering

After identification of a strain(s) that perform well on advantaged or alternative carbon sources, in house genomic sequencing will be used to elucidate the genomic context of this "fitness". Combined with Twig's computational biology and data science expertise, a genome engineering approach will be taken to increase carbon utilization.

4. Exemplification with Twig pathway

Any identified chassis or modified strain that shows potential will be used to express Twigs proprietary constructs and subjected to fermentation analysis in a small scale continuous system.