Team:UCSC/Description

Project Overview

Industrial Agriculture produces enormous quantities of excess, sugar-rich biomass not fit for human consumption. We believe that the tools of synthetic biology can be used to take advantage of this surplus by converting it to high value products and minimizing the amount of waste in agriculture. With this project we engineered bacteria to transform almond hulls into erythritol, a zero-calorie sweetener with a fast growing market. We take on the high cost of sugar alternatives, directly addressing diabetes and obesity, using the underutilized biomass of inedible agricultural co-products. Through public discussion, surveys, expert interviews, and cost analysis, we believe we can utilize synthetic biology to convert non-food almond co-products into Erythritol. In order to push our platform off the bench-top and into the real world, we considered the production costs of this product, and built a low cost bioreactor and purification system to directly address the price point.

With hours before the wiki freeze, the Metabolics Design team received preliminary confirmation of Erythritol production using an HPLC column from engineered Bacillus subtilis. Our process works end to end, moving agricultural waste to Erythritol and opening avenues for future projects and chemicals.