Proposals under this topic should:
- Identify existing, industrially relevant, bio-based process(es) (upstream and conversion steps) and identify the areas of intervention and bottlenecks to improve process flexibility, robustness, techno-economic feasibility and environmental performance. The proposal should consider the case of developing combined processes using biotech and chemical approaches synergistically in order to optimise process and/or (bio)catalyst design for obtaining bio-based products.
- Incorporate reactor design (e.g. membrane reactors, small-scale reactors, microfluidics), process design, process control and optimisation as well as catalysis optimisation aspects that are relevant to also enable tandem chemical/biotech processes, and where applicable for optimisation of continuous production approaches (batch2continuous).
- Identify, optimize/engineer and test more active and robust microbial hosts and their enzymes, or other (bio)catalysts, against relevant process conditions (including physical and chemical stressors). The projects should also consider integrating the biofoundry and synthetic biology advances;
- Ensure and assess productivity, yield, robustness, flexibility of the process.
Overall, modifications and optimisation of the (physico)chemical steps to further optimize chemical/biotech tandem processes are also in scope and could be considered.
