Scientists at The University of Manchester have been awarded nearly £3 million to develop new sustainable ways of manufacturing the chemicals used in thousands of our everyday products.
Fossil fuels currently provide the raw material for the manufacture of many everyday products that we take for granted including pharmaceuticals, food and drink, plastics and personal care. The combined effect of fossil carbon depletion and climate change are forcing us to replace fossil fuels with cleaner more sustainable forms of energy.
Professor Nigel Scrutton and his team at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology are one of five beneficiaries of the BBSRC’s Strategic Longer and Larger Grants (sLoLaS) scheme which funds high-value long-term research projects.
Professor Scrutton’s five year research programme is at the heart of this agenda. His team will design bespoke biological parts and assemble them in novel ways to create a bio-based production pipeline within a synthetic, engineered microbial biofactory. By adopting a production pipeline that embraces the ‘design-build-test-deploy’ life-cycle they will turn knowledge assets into innovative chemicals production solutions to support industrial and academic drug discovery programmes.
Professor Scrutton says the £3 million grant is a substantial boost for Manchester: “Our vision is to harness the power of Synthetic Biology to propel chemicals and natural products production towards ’green’ and sustainable manufacturing processes. More broadly, the programme will provide the general tools, technology platforms and SynBio ‘know-how’ that will impact widely in the sustainable manufacture of chemicals and natural products for development by the industrial sector.”
