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Research - Cell factories

[3] Cell factories (Corroborated closely with all members)

Research Engine “Cell factories” has developed tailor-made cell factories, which can produce various target products from pretreated biomass directly. Two of our original core technologies, “cell surface engineering” and “synthetic bioengineering” accelerate developing cell factories. Creation of highly-engineered microorganism producing various target products leads to innovation.

Cell Surface Engineering

Cell surface engineering is a powerful technology allows to express your target protein on the cell surface. Using membrane localized protein as an anchor, target protein and anchor protein are genetically fused and expressed by appropriate host cells. Cellulases are accumulated on the cell surface of efficient-fetmentable microorganisms, and the “functionalized” microorganisms can produce target compounds from biomass directly. We have developed cell surface engineered microorganisms, such as yrast, Corynebacterium, Aspergillus, Streptomyces, E.coli, lactic acid bacteria, etc.

Synthetic Bioengineering

The construction of biorefinery processes to produce various commodity chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass requires the development of useful microbial strains using intensive application of various biotechnologies. As these capabilities largely depend on microbial metabolic functions, advanced engineering strategies are required to develop microbial cell factories with optimized performance by the modification, overhaul, and de novo construction and integration of metabolic pathways. The metabolic engineering of microorganisms has generally been performed on a trial-and-error basis. After various modifications are tested, the most promising approaches are implemented to increase target production. Although success has been achieved using this method, a novel and rational strategy has recently been pursued for more radical and system-wide modification of metabolism. The novel approach, termed synthetic bioengineering, is essential for creating yeast cell factories for target compound production. The synthetic bioengineering approach is, however, not special as a research and development program.

The research engine can construct a novel cell factory and/or synthesize by integrating the advanced technologies including the in silico pathway mining, genome synthesis, minimum genome factory, and artificial evolution. The synthetic bioengineering is a strategy to address the right way to construct a useful microbial cell factory by integrating a series of advanced techniques including analytical chemistry, computer simulation and biotechnology. A list of target genes produced from a large-scale data and the computer aided metabolic design as well as advanced gene manipulation techniques are essential guide maps and tools to avoid pitfalls in a complexity of metabolic systems. Although it is still a long way of insertions, deletions and expressional controls of multiple genes, it is a time for researchers to hit the road to build a useful microbial cell factory by taking the advantages of the synthetic bioengineering.

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