Overview
This project will advance a novel anaerobic fermentation technology for upcycling food waste into high-value specialty chemicals called medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs). MCFAs are carboxylic acids of 6 to 12 carbon atoms with diverse applications in animal feed, industrial chemicals, food and pharmaceuticals.
Current MCFA supply is heavily dependent on coconut and palm kernel oil, creating major vulnerabilities to the chemicals industry: reputational risks due to deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, high and volatile pricing, and supply chain disruptions. Production is geographically concentrated in Southeast Asia, and regulatory pressure is mounting to reduce the environmental impact of palm oil. These factors create a clear market pull for secure, domestic, low-carbon MCFA production.
Bioproduction of MCFAs from food waste has significant shortcomings. Existing open-culture microbiomes primarily generate C6-C8 MCFAs, show poor selectivity for MCFAs over short-chain fatty acids, and suffer from low yields due to competing processes like methanogenesis. SymBL overcomes these gaps by developing engineered microbiomes from the bottom up. Using defined combinations of bacteria and metabolic engineering, these engineered microbiomes can redirect carbon and energy from food waste toward MCFAs with far greater control, yield, and selectivity compared to conventional open-culture fermentations.
SymBL constructs microbiomes from large in-house culture collections, leveraging automation tools, machine learning, and genetic engineering to assemble and test thousands of microbiomes towards optimal MCFA production. A microbiome with enhanced C6-C8 production from source-separated organic waste (SSO) has already been designed and benchmarked.
The proposed project will support the next development phase: expanding MCFA production up to C12. They have identified the enzyme that restricts MCFA production to C8. The project will deploy novel genetic tools to modify this enzyme in key bacteria, enabling production of C6 to C12 MCFAs via anaerobic fermentation for the first time. These enhanced strains will be integrated into optimized microbiomes, and performance will be validated using SSO in a 20-L continuous bioreactor system.
By achieving first-to-market C6-C12 MCFA bioproduction from food waste, this project significantly expands the market potential for waste-to-MCFA upcycling, while displacing palm-derived chemicals and reducing the economic.