When: 27 October, 15:00
Prof. Nigel Scrutton (Manchester) will talk about biocatalyst engineering and engineering of microbial cell factories for chemicals production.
Biocatalyst engineering and the engineering of microbial cell factories for chemicals production has promised to deliver new routes to chemicals production. Major hurdles to scaled production of chemicals using microbial cell factories remain. Prof. Nigel Scrutton (Manchester) will discuss a number of the current technical, scientific and economic challenges of chemicals production using microbial cell factories. The journey will move from automated strain engineering of the type that they have established in the Manchester Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SYNBIOCHEM) through to multiple scale-up challenges. De-risking of scale-up challenges is being met in the UK Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub (FutureBRH) together with industry partners. Selected examples will be discussed and in particular, he will summarise early commercial activities in the area of fuels production – work that has emerged from microbial strain engineering and scale-up in SYNBIOCHEM and FutureBRH.