Challenge
Achieving high carbon efficiency is one of the primary objectives of industrial strain engineering. Product B required optimisation of a heterologous metabolic pathway where improvements in yield directly determine manufacturing economics. Product B is a pre-cursor to multiple high-value ingredients, and so achieving high metabolic flux would de-risk the biomanufacture of additional products.
Canopy design and wet:lab approach
Canopy was used to explore the biological design space prior to experimentation, combining pathway reasoning, enzyme selection, host optimisation and strain engineering predictions.
Results
Within approximately six months the programme achieved:
- 3.2 g/L product titre
- 32% g/g carbon yield
- 58.84% of maximum theoretical yield
Impact
Reaching almost 60% of the theoretical maximum yield in only six months demonstrates the effectiveness of AI-guided design for accelerating industrial strain optimisation.
The programme illustrates how computational prioritisation can substantially reduce development timelines while improving carbon utilisation and fermentation performance.