Proteins, including enzymes, come in many shapes and sizes, and a lot of them have very useful properties. This means they are found in many products and processes, from beauty treatments to industrial catalysis.
Many current enzyme production methods are too hot and too fast to accurately make some proteins, causing their complex structures to miss-fold. We are developing a low-temperature system to overcome this.
Low temperatures allow enzymes to fold more accurately, increasing the overall quality of each batch compared to current higher-temperature systems. This not only allows us to manufacture difficult-to-produce proteins in general but also lets us access new, commercially useful properties found in enzymes that are naturally found in very cold environments.
As sustainability and carbon footprint reduction are important to us we are developing this technology to enable us to use waste as a raw material for protein production; the lower temperatures also mean we need to use less energy to power our process, reducing resource and carbon costs.
We use a naturally cold-tolerant microorganism to produce our proteins, meaning all of the required cellular machinery is already present for low-temperature manufacture. We are developing and characterising a set of genetic tools that will allow us to easily adapt our system to make any protein of interest, as well as to modify and optimise each component in the system.