Project: Enzymatic sugar coupling

In today’s world our societies are not sustainable. To ensure that all humans can live on our current level of health and wealth without destroying the perspective of future generations to do this as well, we need to convert our societies into fully sustainable civilisations that do not dependent on limited resources. The way we propose to achieve this is to utilise enzymes. Enzymes allow for very benign processes under mild conditions with very high selectivity, drastically reducing energy consumption and waste. These enzymes we propose to immobilise to ensure maximum stability and recycling thereof. At the same time the immobilisation will allow a different reactor concept. With microfluidics we will ensure that already the reaction conditions developed in the laboratory can be directly scaled out to industrial production. Thus enzymes and their immobilisation ensure sustainable processes that can be implemented straightforwardly, as will be proven by the industrial partners in this project. The process we will develop is the coupling of sugars, enabling technology to utilise natural resources. A major problem in this area is that current technology does not allow high yields unless very unsustainable conditions are employed. We propose a combination of modified enzymes that makes it possible to obtain essentially complete yields without waste. To achieve this we will use enzymes that rely on phosphorus activated compounds. Since phosphorus is a limited element on this planet we will modify the enzymes in such a manner that they will utilise less phosphorus. Additionally we will design the process in such a manner that the small amount of phosphorus still necessary can be fully recycled so that the overall phosphorus consumption is zero. Overall a straightforward, environmentally benign coupling of sustainable sugars under mild conditions will be developed and proven in industrial settings.

Acronym	No-P
Website	visit project website
Network	ERA-IB-2
Call	ERA-IB 6th Joint Call in Cooperation with EuroTransBio

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	ChiralVision		Netherlands
	Delft University of Technology		Netherlands
	European Molecular Biology Laboratory		Germany
	Freiberg University of Mining and Technology		Germany
	Mexeo		Poland
	Silesian University of Technology		Poland