Verdezyne is a product-focused company that is leveraging its technology platform to optimize the metabolic pathways, microorganisms and fermentation processes that enable economical production of renewable fuels and chemicals
There are many examples where metabolic engineering has improved bioprocess economics to allow commercial production of commodity chemicals. Despite these commercial successes, the conventional approach to pathway engineering has been a long and tedious trial-and-error process manipulating one gene at a time to optimize a metabolic pathway.
Our technology allows us to take a novel combinatorial approach to pathway engineering that overcomes these limitations by creating and harnessing genetic diversity to rapidly optimize a metabolic pathway. Rather than manipulating one pathway gene at a time, we use synthetic gene libraries to introduce diversity into each pathway gene, combinatorial assembly of multiple pathway genes to introduce enzymatic diversity into a metabolic pathway, and biological selection or high-throughput screening to rapidly identify the most productive combination of pathway genes.
We are applying these tools to develop a versatile yeast production platform that optimizes the conversion of sugars from a variety of feedstocks, including starch, sugarcane and lignocellulosic biomass to renewable fuels and chemicals. We favor a yeast production platform. It has a long history of commercial practice, is robust under industrial processing conditions and has a well developed toolbox that supports rapid engineering to produce multiple products.
