Production of High-Value Chemicals from Renewable Feedstocks: Cooperative Research and Development Final Report, CRADA Number CRD-18-00732

The Visolis project aims to develop an economic and sustainable route toward the production of mevalonic acid (MVL) in two novel microbes using waste biomass as the feedstock (sugar and syngas/waste gas). The two microbes will be engineered with proprietary genes from Visolis, along with genetic tools optimization and the employment of design-build-test-learn cycle to afford the MVL pathway. The integrated process will realize reductions in both CapEx and OpEx due to (1) tolerance of low pH during fermentation which eliminates the costly base addition and alleviates contamination, and (2) improved carbon-conversion efficiency, an important objective for economic production of bioproducts. The rapid advances in microbiology in the last decades have led to the isolation of many microbes with favorable traits for industrial processes, but their utilization for production of sustainable chemicals and renewable fuels has been severely hampered by the lack of available tools for genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Industrial processes are, therefore, currently limited to a few well-characterized hosts such as E. coli and yeasts. Visolis has pioneered a renewable process to produce high value monomers based on using fermentation to produce a hydroxyacid intermediate, MVL, that can be subsequently upgraded to various valuable compounds used in plastics and transportation industries by chemical catalysis. The process has been scaled up to demo scale in collaboration with NLR and commercialization is planned for next year. Production of the platform intermediate, however, will greatly benefit from using a host organism that is both acid-tolerant, which would reduce the need for base for pH balance, and capable of utilizing cheaper feedstocks such as waste gases. To solve these challenges, Visolis has engaged the resources of the ABF consortium to develop new chasses for the production of this industrially important compound in an acid-tolerant microbe and an anaerobic microbe that can fix CO2. Successful completion of the project will develop new host(s) for the production of the platform hydroxyacid that can be directly plugged into Visolis’ production pipeline to produce renewable chemicals for the polymer and plastics industry.