Alternative host strain engineering

Yeast grow to high cell densities on low-cost feed stocks. They can also secrete recombinant proteins into the culture supernatant, which leads to major cost-savings in purification of recombinant proteins. The next-gen protein biopharmaceuticals and integrated process development groups leverage these advantages to iterate rapidly through process and molecule designs. Strain engineering is the reverse problem – how productive can strains be for a particular product or class of products? Specifically, we are interested in the production of human proteins from yeast. This involves the incorporation of human protein folding and secretion machinery, including glycosylation enzymes. The implementation of these ideas requires the constant development of tools for genome editing. We apply synthetic biology principles to develop genome editing strategies, tools, and parts for practical applications in non-model microorganisms.

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