Circumventing evolution in cell factories can pave the way for commercializing new biobased chemicals to large-scale. Bioproduction of chemicals using engineered microorganisms is routinely reported, but only a few bioprocesses are functional in the large fermentation volumes that industry requires. For a longer period, the lack of successful scale-up has been one of the most important challenges for engineers to solve, in order to replace oil-derived production with biobased production of chemicals.
“One central issue is that bioproduction in large-scale fermenters is limited by toxicities and stresses that allow evolution to reduce or eliminate production of chemicals by engineered cells. This makes it expensive and challenging to commercialize biobased production systems in particular when large amounts of chemicals are needed,” said Morten Sommer, professor and scientific director of the bacterial synthetic biology section at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Bio sustainability, Technical University of Denmark.
A new study made by scientists from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Bio sustainability, just published in PNAS, suggested that cells can be engineered to overcome this evolutionary pressure and stably produce high levels of valuable chemicals.
The key is to rewire production cells to only grow when they contain high product concentration. Thus, the evolution can be circumvented and cells will be able to produce the biochemicals within an industrial time scale.
“When we rewire the production microorganism to slow down growth in case it loses production, we efficiently prevent it from performing evolution on the genes leading to production. This allows us to maintain productive cells even when the cells divide to fill up large fermentation tanks,” said Peter Rugbjerg, Postdoc at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Bio sustainability.
Circumventing evolution in cell factories can pave the way for commercializing new biobased chemicals to large-scale. Bioproduction of chemicals using engineered microorganisms is routinely reported, but only a few bioprocesses are functional in the large fermentation volumes that industry requires. For a longer period, the lack of successful scale-up has been one of the most important challenges for engineers to solve, in order to replace oil-derived production with biobased production of chemicals.
“One central issue is that bioproduction in large-scale fermenters is limited by toxicities and stresses that allow evolution to reduce or eliminate production of chemicals by engineered cells. This makes it expensive and challenging to commercialize biobased production systems in particular when large amounts of chemicals are needed,” said Morten Sommer, professor and scientific director of the bacterial synthetic biology section at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Bio sustainability, Technical University of Denmark.
A new study made by scientists from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Bio sustainability, just published in PNAS, suggested that cells can be engineered to overcome this evolutionary pressure and stably produce high levels of valuable chemicals.
The key is to rewire production cells to only grow when they contain high product concentration. Thus, the evolution can be circumvented and cells will be able to produce the biochemicals within an industrial time scale.
“When we rewire the production microorganism to slow down growth in case it loses production, we efficiently prevent it from performing evolution on the genes leading to production. This allows us to maintain productive cells even when the cells divide to fill up large fermentation tanks,” said Peter Rugbjerg, Postdoc at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Bio sustainability.
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