BioSC

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At present, industrial bioprocesses are predominantly based on a “one substrate – one product” concept. The implementation of a sustainable bioeconomy that is competitive with respect to ecologic and economic demands will, however, critically depend on novel highly interwoven value networks based on “multi substrate – multi product” processes in biorefineries. Establishing such processes requires the tight integration of microbial biotransformations, enzymatic cascade reactions, chemical synthesis steps, product recovery and techno-economic analysis, denoted as “hybrid processes”. HyImPAct aims at a major breakthrough in this field by designing a complex hybrid example process for the combined production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (chiral 1,2-diols, amino alcohols) and their bulk chemical precursor, starting from D-xylose as the major carbon source of lignocellulosic hydrolysates. Corynebacterium glutamicum will serve as a platform organism and further engineered towards the utilization of D-xylose containing feedstocks with minimized carbon loss. Process development will be based on a set of recently demonstrated bio- and chemo transformations. The work will be accompanied by profound techno-economic analyses, focusing on the comparison between established vs. proposed alternative production routes. These tasks include the development of new approaches (models and tools) for the design, evaluation and optimization of hybrid processes.