The consortium, led by Professor Gill Stephens of the University of Nottingham, recently achieved success in the Industrial Biotechnology Catalyst — a multi-million pound competition funded by Innovate UK, BBSRC and EPSRC — resulting in the award of £3.46 million in a five-year period.
The consortium includes industrial partners Ingenza, Lucite, the Centre for Process Innovation, Green Biologics and Chain Biotech — along with the University of Nottingham, University College London and the University of Cambridge, aiming to develop new industrial biotechnology-based routes to commodity chemicals, moving away from fossil fuel and petrochemical-derived building blocks.
Project Manager Andrew Wells from the University of Nottingham, said: “Our aim is to use synthetic biology approaches to develop sustainable technologies based on the continuous fermentation of genetically modified cells, enabling the rapid and cost-effective production of commodity chemicals from renewable carbon sources.”
“By using multi-scale modelling and establishing ‘plug and play’ biological processes, we can improve efficiency, helping to accelerate the implementation of scalable bio-based manufacturing processes that are commercially viable.”
