ENZYMATIC BIOPROCESSING OF PECTIN-RICH AGRICULTURAL SIDESTREAMS

ZestBio, Inc. is developing technologies for the production of specialty chemicals from prevalent byproducts of the US fruit and vegetable processing industries.The main goal for thisprojectis to develop a benchscale process fora value-adding in vitro enzymatic conversion technology for the conversion of pectic monosaccharides into specialty chemicals. Achieving this goal will mark a key milestone in the technology development where the technology will be ready for scaling into larger pilot conversion reactions.There are three main objectives towards achieving this goal:Reductase screening and engineering with the target of identifying a reductase with a total turnover number of 2,000,000 in 24 hours.Optimization of protein expression for uronate dehydrogenase and the engineered reductase enzyme to improve enzyme units yield per liter of E. coli by 50%Scaling conversion reactions to 2 liter bioreactors via reaction validation and optimization in 200 mL bioreactors including a design of experiments analysis to build a model approximating the impact of different operating parameters on production.