Berkeley Lab startup makes a new class of ultra-stable enzyme formulations for industrial applications
It’s no secret that extremophiles, or microbes that live in places like polar glaciers and toxic waste pools, may hold treasures worth billions to modern industry. For years, researchers and biotech companies have been “gene prospecting” in extremophiles, looking for DNA they can exploit to make enzymes for everything from laundry detergent to renewable biofuels. Yet when it came to heat and acid resistant enzymes, results have been wanting – until now.
Basic biology research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has led to the formation of Cinder Biological, or CinderBio, a startup company producing a new class of enzymes made from microbes that thrive in hot volcanic waters. Co-founded by Berkeley Lab scientists Steve Yannone and Jill Fuss, CinderBio will first target the food processing industry, where its enzymes can significantly reduce the vast amounts of chemicals and water used to clean equipment. Eventually it expects to formulate enzymes for the biofuels, paper, and textile industries, and possibly even more.
“Our enzymes are unique-they can operate in conditions that nobody else’s can, so this opens up a lot of previously unexplored applications,” said Fuss, a molecular biologist and the company’s chief technology officer. “They’re made from microbes that come from Yellowstone and live in hot acidic pools, so they thrive in nearly boiling acid. We’ve been able to take gene sequences and make them into enzymes that are extraordinarily stable.”
CinderBio won a cash prize in the 2014 FLoW DOE National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition at Caltech. It was also one of eight technologies selected to be a project for the Fall 2013 UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Cleantech to Market program that seeks to translate cleantech research into market opportunities.
For more information visit Cinder Biological.
