The US Department of Energy is supporting a project led by Novozymes that proposes to deliver a screening platform which can be used to reduce discovery time required for tailoring enzymes to process specific contexts.

It’s called SynTec — Synthetic Biology for Tailored Enzyme Cocktails — and its one of the signature synbio developments with immediate applications to the cost of renewable fuels.

Within the project, the team aims to demonstrate use of screening tool to achieve reduction in net production costs for cellulosic sugars — and clearly at stake here is an opportunity to lower biomass to sugar biochemical conversion costs. And good news on this project — use of the screening tool (to deliver improved enzyme) led to 1.4X cost reduction in sugar price in benchmark technoeconomic model (the target was 1.5X).

Sarah Teter of Novozymes gave this illuminating overview of the project’s promise and progress at the DOE Project Peer Review meetings.

SynTec: The Digest’s 2018 Multi-Slide Guide to Synthetic Biology for Tailored Enzyme Cocktails