Industrial Biotechnology is key to maintaining Europe's leading position in the bio-based market and boosting its transition towards a green and circular economy. This requires the development of innovative technologies such as those proposed in the ROBUSTOO EU project, coordinated by the Spanish Research Council, CSIC. The aim of ROBUSTOO is to demonstrate the applicability of three families of oxidative enzymes (non-specific peroxygenases, laccases and hydroxymethylfurfural oxidases) in the innovative and sustainable production of bio-based chemicals and materials. The potential of these enzymes as industrial catalysts has been shown in previous projects of the consortium. ROBUSTOO will address the development of more robust enzymes better adapted to industrial conditions, as well as their production at pilot scale. Activities will start with sequence bioprospecting and computational enzyme design (by BSC). Simultaneously, work will be carried out on the development of microbial strains for the industrial production of enzymes and their variants obtained by protein engineering, and then the optimisation and demonstration at pilot scale of their application in selected enzyme transformations, all of which will be carried out by several biotech SMEs (MetGen, Gecco, bisy, and InnoSyn) and research/technology centres (CIB and IRNAS of CSIC, Autonomous University of Barcelona and FCBA institute). The work will conclude with the techno-economic and environmental evaluation of the technologies developed, and the elaboration of commercial exploitation plans (Italbiotec). The new biotransformations to be demonstrated at ROBUSTOO represent cutting-edge biotechnological solutions for: (i) the conversion of industrial lignins into bio-based material components, increasing the commercial value of available lignin by-products; (ii) the production of chemicals difficult to achieve by chemical synthesis, through regio/stereo-selective enzymatic oxygenations of lipophilic substrates; and (iii) the synthesis of sugar-derived plastic components, as a sustainable alternative to chemical catalysis and the use of petroleum-derived precursors. www.robustoo.eu

Resúmen del póster presentado en el 7th LignoBiotech international conference 14-17 oct., 2024 in Toulouse, France

Funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement no. 101135119.

Peer reviewed