JBEI spins out Lygos to commercialize sugar-metabolizing microbes

Biorefining Magazine
By Erin Voegele March 05, 2012

The U.S. DOE’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has spun out its first company, Lygos. The technology developed at JBEI, which will be commercialized by the new company, features designer microorganisms that metabolize sugar and can produce a wide variety of molecules.

According to information released by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which leads JBEI, the technology essentially repurposes a class of proteins that have been used for decades to make antibiotics and other drugs. Polyketide synthases are a (PKS) are a family of multifunctional enzymes that produce polyketides, hydrocarbon chains that serve as the backbone for many natural and synthetic organic chemicals. The JBEI researchers redesigned the PKS pathway by mixing and matching genetic information to produce compounds that were never made by nature but are used in everyday synthetic materials.

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