Mankind’s impact on the planet has led to a recognition for the need to move industry to sustainable production, something upon which biomanufacturing promises to deliver.
But Evolver CEO Joe Price, University of Sheffield biomanufacturing professor Kang Lan Tee, and University of Sheffield Senior Lecturer Tuck Seng Wong, writing in Open Access Government, argue that if the end bioproduct of biomanufacturing is too expensive to compete with existing incumbents like petrochemical-derived plastics or intensive agriculture-derived milk proteins, biomanufacturing will never succeed at the scale needed.
Biomanufacturing processes today focus on using single microbial strains as biological factories. Because these are done in large steel fermentation tanks that do not represent the natural states for these microbes, they say biomanufacturing is inefficient and expensive.
The solution, though, lies in biology itself. They argue we need to approach the design challenge of microbes for biomanufacturing by embracing evolution as a solution.
“We must design bespoke hardware systems for perpetual, tightly controllable microbe evolution at throughputs that aren’t currently possible. We must develop new ways to amplify genetic diversity, create larger mutant pools and access dormant genes. Perhaps most challenging, we must put aside our hubris and embrace the beauty, complexity and hidden potential of stochastic systems,” they write. “For this, we must take a holistic view of how we industrialize microbial factories, both engineering upwards deterministically and evolving downwards stochastically.”
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