Engineering extreme biology to
create industrial-strength catalysts
Enzymes are nature’s chemical manufacturers.
But enzymes are fragile.
Enzymes make all the chemicals of life. They make the cotton and silk in our clothes, the wood in our homes, and the colors in flowers. But like flowers, enzymes are fragile. While enzymes offer a path to making chemicals sustainably, they are often too expensive to use at industrial scale because of their expense to manufacture and fragility.
An entirely new approach to designing and scaling enzymes
Industrial production facilities are very different from any enzyme’s native environment. To create sustainable chemicals, manufacturers need enzymes that can reliably do their jobs in industrial extremes. Traditionally, enzymes have been stabilized through two disparate techniques: enzyme engineering through directed evolution or immobilization using materials science. Using a new synthetic biology platform that stabilizes enzymes inside of highly-stable, bacteria-made particles, we are uniting these two fields and creating powerful enzymatic solutions.
Our Platform
An evolvable shell for enzymes
-
We engineer bacteria to make enzymes and the enzyme carrier simultaneously. Embedding enzymes in our protein carriers improves stability.
-
Every piece of our catalyst is genetically encoded, both the carrier and the enzyme. We can use powerful tools like directed evolution and AI to improve catalyst performance.
-
Our production platform eliminates the most expensive steps in traditional biocatalyst production. Lower production costs can enable new industries and reinvent old ones.