I’m always on the lookout for new companies in the renewable chemicals/materials industry and one of the ways to do this is keeping tabs on grants and funding from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Bioenergy Technologiees Office (BETO).  The department’s Agile BioFoundry Consortium (ABF), a consortium of national laboratories dedicated to accelerating biomanufacturing and building the US bioeconomy, recently announced six new partnerships under the DOE’s new $5 million funding to develop novel microbial hosts and bioproducts, the use of cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning in synthetic biology, and address the problem of production heterogeneity in industrial microbiology.

DOE has selected the following projects:

• Huue (Oakland, CA), will build on existing biotechnology to improve the production of biosynthetic indigo dye, a sustainable replacement for fossil-derived indigo.

• Industrial Microbes (Alameda, CA), will work on eliminating barriers to the use of gaseous feedstocks by creating a predictive model that identifies productivity improvements, forecasts performance, and enhances the robustness of gas fermentation processes.

• LanzaTech (Skokie, IL), will expand the genetic engineering toolbox of the non-model organism Clostridium spp. in order to accelerate the discovery process of next-generation biofuels and chemicals.

• Levadura Biotechnology (San Diego, CA), will work on efficient production of triacetic acid lactone, a precursor to several bio-based products.

• Technology Holding (Salt Lake City, UT), will develop a bio-based replacement for adipic acid, a precursor of nylon, aiming to generate enough material for testing with partners in the fashion industry.

• TeselaGen Biotechnology (San Francisco, CA), will lay the foundation for deploying artificial intelligence on community-generated data, saving resources and speeding up the biomanufacturing commercialization timeline.

Each of the awardees has committed to a minimum 20% cost-share contribution. These projects will leverage national laboratory capabilities to address challenges in biomanufacturing.

I am not familiar with Huue, Levadura Biotechnology and Technology Holding so I am definitely looking forward to learning more about these companies.

ABF partners include Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and more than a dozen university and industry partners.