Project: Improved cellulosomes to enhance saccharification of industrially-suitable lignocellulosic biomass residues
Objectives 1. Characterization of natural cellulosomes and candidate substrates. FiberFuel will produce the basic components of natural cellulosomes as well as other lignocellulosic enzymes and characterize two industrial substrates of interest (wheat straw and corn stover) to understand the architecture, nanomechanics and catalytic properties of cellulosomes, and the logic behind their construction. 2. Multi-scale modeling of the cellulosome for in silico knowledge integration. This will provide crucial support for the synthesis, assembly and characterization tasks, supplying detailed structural and energetic information to aid designing and interpreting experiments. 3. Rational design of DCs. Integration of acquired knowledge from 1 and 2 into DCs and subsequent activity screening will allow constructing DCs optimized for degrading selected industrial substrates, and validated at the laboratory scale. Expected results 1. A standard activity assay to monitor cellulosic substrate degradation. 2. Test of the mechanical hypothesis of the cellulosome. 3. Supramolecular DC structure characterized at the atomic and molecular levels. 4. Molecular and supra-molecular models of DCs. 5. Optimized DCs obtained based on rational design for the specific industrial substrates. Exploitation FiberFuel is very likely to generate new intellectual property covering the optimized cellulosome derivatives and processes for biomass degradation into fermentable sugars. Both the standard activity assay and DCs produced will be patented, which will be used and exploited by ABNT and DesEn. The developed technology will be unique and as such is not expected to conflict with other intellectual property.
| Acronym | FIBERFUEL |
| Duration | 01/01/2013 - 30/11/2016 |
| Website | visit project website |
| Network | ERA-IB-2 |
| Call | 3rd ERA-IB Joint Call |
Project partner
| Number | Name | Role | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abengoa Bioenergía Nuevas Tecnologías SA | Spain | ||
| Designer Energy | Israel | ||
| Joint Research Unit National Center for Scientific Research / University Pierre et Marie Curie - Roscoff Marine Station | France | ||
| Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich | Germany | ||
| Polish Academy of Sciences | Poland | ||
| Spanish National Research Council | Coordinator | Spain | |
| University College Cork - Tyndall National Institute | Ireland | ||
| Weizmann Institute of Science | Israel |