PROMYS – Programming synthetic networks for bio-based production of value chemicals – FP7 project

Abstract

The global chemical industry is transitioning from petrochemical production processes to bio-based production processes. This transition creates a clear market need for technologies that reduce the development time and cost of cell factories. PROMYS will develop, validate and implement a novel synthetic biology platform technology termed ligand responsive regulation and selection systems. Ligand responsive regulation and selection systems are biological devices that integrate biological sensing modules, within larger regulatory networks to control cellular programs. This technology will drastically accelerate the construction, optimization and performance of cell factories by enabling industrial users to impose non-natural objectives on the engineered cell factory. PROMYS will address three major challenges in metabolic engineering that limit the development of new cell factories:1) Synthetic pathway construction2) Cell factory optimization3) Control of populations during fermentation Ligand responsive regulation and selection systems will directly couple the presence of a desired chemical product or flux state within a cell, to the survival of the cell. As such, they allow the in vivo identification of the needle (e.g. functional pathway or optimized cell factories) in a haystack (e.g. large libraries). In addition, the technology developed in PROMYS will be applied to deliver increased fermentation yields by continuously selecting for high yielding cell factories within the fermentation population.PROMYS is industry driven and designed such that the expected innovations of each work package have a direct commercialization partner, which is willing to commit the necessary resources to develop commercial products from the innovation.