Industrial Platform Development for Commercial Enzyme Production

Enzymes are biological molecules that facilitate chemical reactions in living cells. Many products in the food, fine chemical, flavour & fragrance, pharmaceutical and biotherapeutic industries use enzymes in their manufacturing processes. Many enzymes on the market are isolated from their original wild-type organism, many more need to be produced in a different host organism that is more suitable for large-scale industrial production and is capable of providing commercially viable yields of the enzyme. To optimise the level of production of the enzyme is time consuming and costly and often results in failure to achieve commercial yield targets due to the inherent biology of the host and the enzyme. Therefore, this project will develop a broad-host range expression system for expressing any new enzyme in a selection of industrially compatible microorganisms and assessing enzyme production in these multiple hosts prior to selecting the one that provides the highest yields for that enzyme.