Cold-adapted enzymes are very challenging to produce in standard bacterial production hosts because here they typically form inactive aggregates. This challenge represents perhaps the biggest bottleneck for further developments of new enzyme products from marine bioprospecting.
Development of improved expression systems for enzymes with extreme properties could potentially have large impact on national and international biotech industry because such enzymes are highly efficient at low temperatures, and can therefore contribute to more environmentally friendly industrial processes and better quality on industrial products.
The main objective of PsyXpress is to develop a bacterium, which is naturally adapted to extreme environmental conditions, for efficient production of cold-adapted enzymes.
We have recently identified a marine bacterium as a very interesting candidate for further commercial developments. The most important reasons are that the bacterium grows well at low temperatures, it grows fast and to high densities, it is sensitive to a number of commonly used antibiotics, expression of enzymes can be induced simply by adding a synthetic chemical, the bacterial genome is known, and the its genome can be manipulated in a site-specific fashion using
standard genetic tools.
We expect that the end product of this project will be a new bacterial strain that will pave the way for more efficient production of enzymes adapted to extreme conditions. There is currently a great demand for such a product on the market, and several companies could have the system as a product in their portfolio, either in the form of commercial kits with live cells and reagents or as service where cloning and expression is done by the provider.
