Industrial Microbiology

Technology

The final yield of a bioprocess is directly linked to the efficiency of the strain used. Biomillenia’s ultra-high-throughput screening platform, in synergy with digital culturomics, enables the identification and selection of organisms at a speed and scale unmatched by any other platform. While strains for bioprocesses are typically selected from thousands of candidates, we start from millions, which increases the ability to find most productive candidate strains many times over!

These ultra-high throughput capabilities can be used either for the selection of natural strains or as part of a directed evolution process. Special microfluidic chips can be developed to perform the assays. Here is an example of the microfluidic workflow of a yeast-based process:

Figure source: Scientific Reports | 6:27223 | DOI: 10.1038/srep27223

Real case studies

Biomillenia and Amyris, Inc.—a leading synthetic biotechnology company in the development and production of sustainable ingredients for the Health & Wellness, Clean Beauty, and Flavors & Fragrances market—have signed a research and development collaboration agreement using Biomillenia’s microfluidic culture platform for phenotypic screening of production strains developed by Amyris.

Following a successful technology evaluation project using BIOMILLENIA’s proprietary droplet-based microfluidic cell culture and screening technology platform, BIOMILLENIA and Merck collaborated to develop a market-leading enzyme in Merck’s portfolio of industry-leading enzyme solutions.

BIOMILLENIA signed an agreement with SOUFFLET to jointly develop novel cellulolytic and proteolytic enzymes as additives for animal feed that, among other things, improve feed digestibility, leading to better animal growth, and expand the range of raw materials for feed formulations. The project was also selected as one of the winners of the Global Innovation Competition initiated by the French government.