Squalene
- Category
- Cosmetics and Personal Care, Polymers and Plastics
Origins:
Natural triterpenoid from shark liver oil, olive oil, and plants; biosynthetic precursor of steroids (Shalu et al., 2024; Elsharawy and Refat, 2024; Barp, Višnjevec and Moret, 2024).
Key Features:
Antioxidant, high skin penetrability, enhances immune system, vaccine adjuvant; used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and functional foods (Shalu et al., 2024; Schütte et al., 2024; Mendes, Azevedo-Silva and Fernandes, 2022; Barp, Višnjevec and Moret, 2024). Bioactive, health benefits, precursor to steroids.
Sustainability:
Shift from shark-derived to sustainable sources; challenges in yield and economic viability (Elsharawy and Refat, 2024; Mendes, Azevedo-Silva and Fernandes, 2022; Bibik et al., 2022).
bio:drive - intelligent microbe design
Here’s what bio:drive says about Squalene:
- Viable pathways recommended / (generated) 2 / (135)
- Median pathway length 3 biochemical reactions
- Max free energy change -146.6 KJ.mol-1
- Max theoretical yield 12.5 %
- Predicted pathway bottlenecks 3 reactions
- Enzyme variants recommended / (generated) 15 / (12,225)
- Predicted enzyme reactivity improvement 2.3x
- Predicted host microbe bottlenecks 3 genetic edits
- Predicted host microbe flux improvement 4.5x
- Continuous fermentation enabled
- Number of microbe versions designed for grow:bot build 334,800
- Overall potential improvement with bio:drive 5x
Ready to start building using grow:bot?
At twig, we find the best possible microbe to produce your ingredients using our fast, automated builder, grow:bot. In a matter of weeks, you can go from concept to having your own engineered microbe.
Our wet-lab combines fast micro-scale microbe builds, with high-throughput fermentation screening. And all of our microbes are built to last, ready for large-scale and continuous fermentation systems.
