Technological offer - ENG4BIO-UAB Industrial Biotechnology Platform

The ENG4BIO Industrial Biotechnology Platform is a TECNIO technology transfer agent of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), offering the following portfolio of technology offers and cooperation opportunities:

​

Bioproduction of organic acids from methanol:

The sustainable production of platform chemicals from renewable feedstocks, particularly from those not compiting with agriculture (e.g., CO2-derived), poses a number of challenges that have hampered their industrial exploitation.

ENG4BIO provides a last-generation microbial platform based on methylotrophic yeast, designed to produce organic acids such as 3-hydroxypropionic and succinic acids (platform chemicals for the synthesis of bioplastics and other products) using methanol as a feedstock. Importantly, renewable methanol can be from CO2 or urban waste.

This technology offers a scalable, versatile and sustainable alternative to conventional prodution systems of these platform chemicals.

Microbial plaftorm with improved robustness for protein production in continous production systems

The increase in the demand of proteins across sectors, from pharma to food and feed, is pushing the limits of conventional production processes, often operated in batch or fed-batch mode. Continous bioprocessing is an hightly attractive alternative in terms of efficiency, scalability and costs/revenues. Nevertheleess, it poses an important challenge, i.e., the stability of the producing microorganisms during long-term fermentations. Our innovation, based on the engineering of the microbial cell factory (yeast) used to produce recombinant proteins, allows us to improve production both in terms of efficiency (yields and productivities) and system's stability/robustness.

Enzymatic carbon capture:

The ENG4BIO team has developed a multi-enzymatic platform for capture and utilisation of carbon dioxide valorise CO2 and glyererol. Such system is based on the integration of two enzymes in an heterogeneous bi-functional biocatalizer allowing the production of two added-value chemicals, formic acid and dihydroxyacetone. Product concentration values are the highest reported so far using a multi-enzymatic system.

In addition, the ENG4BIO Industrial Biotechnology platform (member of the European Research Infrastructure IBISBA) ofers the following R&D capacities, focused on the integrated development and exploitation of microbial and enzymatic production platforms:

1. Microbial strain design and construction: Strain development to produce recombinant proteins and chemicals using computational and synthetic biology tools such as modular cloning and CRISPR/Cas9. Experience in E. coli and P. pastoris cell factories.
2. Integrated microbial bioprocessing: Development and intensification of bioprocesses based on microbial cell factories to produce proteins and chemicals, including fermentations in bioreactors operated in continous or fed-batch mode, as well as initial product recovery steps.
3. Biocatalytic processes: Design of enzymatic or multi-enzymatic reactions to produce chemicals of interest, including the enzyme characterisation, use of advanced enzyme immobilisation techniques, as well as the optimisation of reactions and reactor operational strategies with soluble or immobilised enzymes.
4. Process scale-up: Fermentation and early recovery steps scale up from laboratory to pilot plant to evaluate techo-economical feasibility as well as producing samples to test and validate product applications.