The production of specialty chemicals from renewable feedstocks requires the use of microbes to convert sugars contained in the biomass into desired products.

At Myriant, our capabilities in metabolic engineering and directed evolution of microbial systems that enable us to construct organisms that act as biocatalysts to make such high value, high purity renewable chemicals efficiently at commercial scale.

Our scientific team is proficient in the bioengineering of systems based on several different microorganisms including E. coli, Bacillus, Streptomyces, Corynbacterium and Yeast.  They engineer genes of biosynthetic pathways that promote reaction along desired pathways while eliminating byproduct formation.

In particular, Myriant has developed a novel system that genetically modifies E-coli bacterium, yeast, thermophiles and other microbial hosts through the chromosome and not just the cell wall, making the resulting organism much more stable at large scale production.

These engineered microorganisms are used to produce a number of valuable substances including organic acids, vitamins (riboflavin, pantothenate), amino acids (methionine, tryptophan), enzymes, other fine/specialty chemicals and commodity chemicals. Metabolic engineering involves manipulation of a microorganism so that its cells produce a specific, desired substance.  Typically efforts to affect the metabolic pathway also include reduction of energy consumption and waste production, ensuring that the cells function with maximum efficiency.

Directed evolution is used to create microorganisms with desired characteristics such as the ability to produce a certain specialty chemical.  In general, a specific gene or set of genes encoding a protein or other biochemical agent are changed in many different ways through mutation or recombination to create a large number of variations (diversification).  The variants are then screened to identify those that exhibit the characteristics being sought (selection).  Chosen variants are replicated to allow for DNA sequencing (amplification).  They are also subjected to further rounds of experiments to obtain variants with the highest propensity to exhibit the desired properties.