The Nagoya Protocol is a supplementary agreement to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), adopted in Japan in 2010 and effective from October 12th 2014. Its primary objective is to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from using genetic resources, thereby promoting the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. All the yeast strains used by Phenotypeca for breeding and QTL optimisation comply with the Nagoya Protocol.
Phenotypeca’s strains are used to gain insights into the evolution and industrial application of yeast genomics. This work included the development of specialist QTL analytical methods to interpret the genomes of improved strains and inform further breeding rounds.
Breeding & screening to utilise evolutionary genomics
This allows for an iterative breeding process, screening for better-performing strains tailored to the project specifics and then performing QTL analysis to determine the allelic combinations responsible for improvements. This process also guides the selection of parents for the next round of breeding, iterating until the optimum strains are obtained.
This QTL technology process uses proprietary strain libraries carefully created to have genetic diversity beyond that possible with a single chassis. Thereafter, evolution is harnessed through successive iterative cycles of breeding, screening, and QTL analysis. This can also be combined with targeted genetic modifications. Using evolution in this manner breaks through the limitations described above, which are intrinsic in existing genetic engineering approaches using single-chassis systems.
QTL technology, therefore, brings bespoke multi-parameter optimisation to biologics strain development for the first time. Multi-parameter means optimising different aspects of the strain to improve the overall bioprocess according to the product’s specific needs and market. Typically, this could involve the secretion of a difficult-to-express protein and/or increasing the titre of an existing biologic while reducing the level and complexity of downstream processing.
If all the planets in our galaxy were covered in an Ocean, the depth of the Pacific Ocean. The search for the optimum genetic solution is analogous to finding a drop of water in the Ocean’s covering all such planets. To understand the scale of this see the numerical diagram below.
