The bioprocessing industry’s potential to enable the creation of entirely new products and practices has long been recognised. Yet despite the strong market pull factors and skilled employment opportunities to be gained from this industrial transformation, conventional research approaches to optimising bioprocessing to unlock are still falling short.
How can the vast economic and environmental promise offered by using bioprocessing to create products across a wide range of industries be realised? This is a challenge of making a variety of biological and other substances to a defined specification at consistently high quality. Additionally achieving this with a cost of manufacture sufficiently low to be competitive in the markets concerned.
What is the bioprocessing economy?
The proposed system by which bioprocessing is applied to various aspects of manufacturing in various industrial sectors, is known as the bioprocessing economy. This is achieved through the optimisation of microbial strains and fermentation methods.
Bioprocessing methods can overcome key technical barriers in the synthesis of complex molecules, expanding the range of useful compounds at our disposal. They can also utilise waste byproducts of one process as a feedstock or substrate of another, improving sustainability.
Limitations of synthetic biology
Synthetic biology has largely driven progress in bioprocessing over recent years. In the sustainable biosynthesis of trans-β-farnesene, a versatile hydrocarbon, it has even been successful on an industrial scale. Yet the failure rate among other bioprocessing projects rooted in synthetic biology is high, even as the discipline continues to develop.
This is largely because synthetic biology to date has shared the limitations of traditional genetic engineering, as a result of deploying a narrow perspective to the true complexity of biology. As a result of this perspective there is an absence of the information needed to reliably reproduce or repurpose novel bioprocesses rooted in synthetic biology. As a consequence they struggle to make certain substances and even when they can successfully produce the desired substance they fail to scale. Typically they are hampered by limitations such as poor yield, inconsistent product quality, and genetic instability within the industrial strain itself.
Consequently, establishing a bioprocessing operation typically involves substantial costs and long development times with high rates of failure thereby proving to be a major obstacle to the growth of the bioeconomy.
QTL technology
Where synthetic biology falls short, a new approach that harnesses the power of evolution using quantitative trait loci (QTL) technology promises to unleash the potential of the bioprocessing economy. By letting evolution do the hard work of genetic modification and strain optimisation, substances that were otherwise not possible to produce can be feasibly manufactured, consistently at high quality while simultaneously substantially lowering the costs of production. The time and costs of developing such new bioprocess can also be drastically reduced. This benefits both existing players in the industry, and smaller newcomers who would not otherwise afford the costs and risks associated with synthetic biology.
By providing the technological drive to meet the challenges of the bioprocessing economy, QTL also enables disruptors in other sectors, giving them broader access to feasible and scalable bioprocessing development operations. QTL is not a panacea and each case will depend on the inherent technical challenges involved, it does however address the key constraints of existing synthetic biology approaches.
Harnessing evolution to drive the bioeconomy
QTL technology achieves these results by allowing evolution to deliver powerful but often unexpected changes to the genome. For example, a change that is pivotal to the optimisation of a strain may not appear, on the basis of current understanding, to be involved in the biosynthetic pathway, or any related pathways, and would therefore not have been considered in a standard synthetic biology-based approach. Such changes arise because of the true complexity of the cell’s biology, and the interactions between the layers within it. These remain to a large extent poorly understood, even with the most powerful computational tools available to academics and industrial genetic engineers.
However, these changes underpin the power, efficiency, and adaptability of biology. It is by recognising their key importance and adapting the technological approach to address them that the potentially immense value of the bioprocessing economy can be realised.
