It's no secret that extremophiles, or microbes that live in
places like polar glaciers and toxic waste pools, may hold
treasures worth billions to modern industry. For years,
researchers and biotech companies have been "gene prospecting"
in extremophiles, looking for DNA they can exploit to make
enzymes for everything from laundry detergent to renewable
biofuels. Yet when it came to heat and acid resistant enzymes,
results have been wanting until now.
Basic biology research at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has led to the formation of Cinder
Biological, or CinderBio, a startup company producing a new
class of enzymes made from microbes that thrive in hot volcanic
waters. Co-founded by Berkeley Lab scientists Steve Yannone
and Jill Fuss, CinderBio will first target the food
processing industry, where its enzymes can significantly reduce
the vast amounts of chemicals and water used to clean
equipment. Eventually it expects to formulate enzymes for the
biofuels, paper, and textile industries, and possibly even more.
"Our enzymes are unique they can operate in conditions
that nobody else's can, so this opens up a lot of previously
unexplored applications," said Fuss, a molecular biologist and the
company's chief technology officer. "They're made from
microbes that come from Yellowstone and live in hot acidic
pools, so they thrive in nearly boiling acid. We've been able to
take gene sequences and make them into enzymes that are
extraordinarily stable."
CinderBio won a cash prize in the 2014 FLoW DOE
National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition at Caltech. It
was also one of the eight technologies selected to be a project for
the Fall 2013 UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Cleantech to
Market program that seeks to translate cleantech research into
market opportunities.
This year, with a SBIR (Small Business Innovation
Research) Phase 1 grant from the National Science Foundation,
CinderBio tested its technology at a local creamery. The cleaning of dairy and other food processing equipment is
normally a multi-step process. "They use a lot of base, then
they wash, then acid, then wash, then sanitizer," said Fuss. "It
takes a lot of time and uses a lot of chemicals and water. The
microbes in the equipment can be hard to get rid of, so in some
areas they've started to use harsher chemicals to combat those
biofilms.
In the field trials, using CinderBio's enzymes to do the
cleaning in place of chemicals, Yannone, a named inventor and
the company's CEO, said he was amazed at how successful
they were. "I came back after our first trials and recalculated
everything because I thought we had moved a decimal point,"
he said. "We reduced water usage by almost 30 percent and our
enzymes removed contaminants much faster and much more
effectively than we had expected. The managers and owner at
the creamery were all very excited by our results."
CinderBio‘s enzymes come from extremophiles found in
hot volcanic waters, like this thermal pool in Yellowstone
National Park.
Enzymes are naturally occurring molecules that act as
catalysts to activate or speed up biochemical reactions; their
use in industry is commonplace and usually beneficial to the
environment since they can replace or reduce the use of
chemicals or allow processes to take place at lower
temperatures, lowering energy use.
CinderBio's technology comes from extremophilic
microbes that grow naturally in thermal pools and have been
studied for many years. The Berkeley Lab team was able to
exploit aspects of the biology of these extreme microbes to turn
them into enzyme-making machines. They developed a set of
genetic tools that allow them to introduce naturally occurring
genes into these microbes to produce enzymes that are more
heat- and acid- stable than what has been available.
"Historically scientists have thought that all the
information needed to make an active enzyme is entirely
encoded in the DNA sequence," said Yannone. "Some of our
revelations center on the idea that that's not true, that there are
other components in a microbe making an enzyme that's stable
and works in hot acid other than just the DNA sequence."
Yannone and Fuss first started studying the microbe
about 10 years ago, looking for the fundamental biological
processes that allowed it to thrive in such extreme conditions.
Although scientists are still investigating what exactly confers
such extreme stability on the microbe, Fuss was able to characterize the structural biochemistry of one of the enzymes.
And Yannone, working with his undergraduate student then
technician, Adam Barnebey, developed the molecular biology
system that led to the formation of CinderBio.
Their invention was patented by Berkeley Lab, and
Barnebey was the company's first employee. They are under
consideration for a Phase 2 SBIR grant and next year may seek
additional outside funding. They plan to further refine the
platform and scale up production while seeking practical
feedback from the food processing industry, a vast market.
"We think a lot about what we eat and how our food is
grown, but we don't think about what happens in the middle,"
Fuss said. "Our technology helps make food processing more
sustainable and could be used for any food product that goes in
a container and ends up on a shelf."
Besides saving water and time, use of CinderBio's
enzymes would also cut down on chemical waste. Chemical
wastewater cannot be reclaimed and instead often has to be
trucked off-site. Replacing these chemicals with biodegradable
CinderBio enzymes makes that wastewater reclaimable, of
particular importance given the ongoing drought in California.
"It's great when Berkeley Lab scientists are able to
transform their fundamental research into an innovative
technology that not only solves industry challenges but also
contributes to our country's energy and environmental
challenges," said Elsie Quaite-Randall, Berkeley Lab's Chief
Technology Transfer Officer.
Source: www.phys.org
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