Spanish Neol Bio signs agreement with US NREL to develop microorganisms able to produce oleochemicals from sustainable feedstocks

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The blog followers already know Neol Bio through a post published early this year (Neol Bio in the spotlight – Advanced bioprocesses for the oleochemical industry). It is one of the most promising companies of the Spanish biotechnology industry. In fact, the US organization BIO (Biotechnology Innovation Organization) has recently published a report positioning Neol Bio beside the main international companies of that sector.

Today, the company heardquarted in Granada announced the signing of a collaboration agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop microorganisms able to produce fatty alcohols from lignocellulosic sugars (see press release).

This collaboration is geared towards meeting DOE’s goal of achieving cost-competitive liquid transportation fuels derived from renewable lignocellulosic biomass.  Over the last couple of years, NREL has been working with a species of yeast called Rhodosporidium toruloides, which is an oleaginous yeast that accumulates a large percentage of its cell mass as triglycerides (see article). Such triglycerides can be upgraded to fuels with diesel-like properties. However, these lipids are difficult to extract from inside the cells making the process prohibitively expensive. Neol Bio has engineered a yeast to produce fatty alcohols which are secreted from the cell thus potentially making the extraction much simpler and cost effective.

Video: MicroBiOil® is the platform of Neol Bio to produce high added value oils and microbial derived oleochemicals from renewable sources.

Neol have provided their strains to NREL for them to analyze fatty alcohol productivity on their lignocellulosic hydrolysates. Preliminary tests of replicating Neol Bio’s published results on rich growth media are underway. Following the successful completion of these experiments, NREL will move into the next phase of fermentations using pretreated and enzymatically hydrolyzed corn stover as a sole carbon source for the organism.  These sets of fermentations will establish the baseline fatty alcohol production metrics from NREL’s standard cellulosic feedstock and demonstrate the potential for large- scale deployment of this technology.

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