Synthetic Biology Drives the Green Transition

Production of many valuable biomaterials today is neither green nor sustainable. Flavours, fragrances, dyes, pesticides, and biopolymers, are currently produced either from petroleum using environmentally damaging catalysts and solvents, or by over-cultivation and over-harvesting of plants. Other biomaterials, such as proteins derived from milk, egg, or meat, require animal farming, considerable amounts of land and energy, and are responsible for a large percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions. The future of our planet depends on our ability to replace current technologies for producing these biomaterials with new, sustainable, and, at the same time, economically viable methods. Engineering organisms to produce the biomaterials we use today by converting simple biomass to valuable products holds the key to the green transition. In this lecture, I will present how our work combines basic research in biochemistry with protein engineering of biosynthetic enzymes and metabolic engineering of industrially amenable microorganisms to provide solutions for a greener planet. Using specific examples, I will demonstrate the complete process from the identification of a target compound, the elucidation of its biosynthesis, the establishment of laboratory strains that synthesize the desirable product, the upscaling of production to achieve viable scales and cost, and finally, the commercialization process that brings the final product to the consumer.

Participants:
Sotirios Kampranis: Professor of Biochemical Engineering at the University of Copenhagen. Session Moderator: Vaso Michopoulou, Biologist-Journalist Science-Regular Member EΣΗΕΑ

Sotirios Kampranis is Professor of Biochemical Engineering at the University of Copenhagen. He studied chemistry at the Aristotle University and biochemistry at the University of Sussex, UK. He obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Leicester in the UK, where he studied the mechanism of DNA
topoisomerases. He carried out his postdoctoral training on the mechanism of chromatin-modifying enzymes and their role in cancer at the Tufts University Medical School in Boston, USA. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the Medical School of the University of Crete in 2013. In 2016, he joined the University of Copenhagen where he became a Professor in 2021.