Specialty Enzymes Business Unit

Providing the enabling enzyme technology to help cure America’s “addiction to oil” by making next-generation biofuels

The power of enzymes

Enzymes are specialized proteins that accelerate (catalyze) chemical reactions and are essential in all living systems. Without enzymes, biological processes would occur much too slowly to sustain life. In fact, enzymes are so powerful that one single enzyme can process a million molecules every second.

Sources of enzymes

Microbes, such as bacteria or fungi, are abundant sources of unique enzymes and can be found in almost every ecosystem, including oceans, deserts, rain forests, and arctic regions. Through generations of natural selection in these diverse environments, microbes have developed broad and varied characteristics which allow them to survive in environments of extreme temperature, pressure, pH and salinity. As a result, the microbial world provides a rich source of high diverse genetic material.

“Bioprospecting”; tapping the world’s resources

In the quest to discover novel products, Verenium has pioneered the field of “bioprospecting”. This has enabled the company to tap into the vast genetic resources of the microbial world by venturing into varied and often hostile environments, such as volcanoes and deep sea hydrothermal vents. Because the harsh temperatures and pH conditions in which these “extremophiles” live often mimic conditions found in today’s industrial processes, extremophilic microbes represent a valuable source of potential products.

Screening to commercialization

Through the use of Verenium’s proprietary technologies, microbial DNA is extracted directly from collected environmental samples, and expression libraries are constructed and screened using high throughput technologies. This provides access to previously untapped biodiversity from natural resources. Verenium can also rapidly cultivate and isolate mixed populations of microorganisms using ground-breaking methods. The enzyme may be directly commercialized after expression and manufacturing, or may be further optimized and tailored for commercial application by Verenium’s state-of-the-art evolution technologies.

Commercial applications

Enzymes play a vital role in a wide variety of commercial applications in the specialty industrial processing, biofuels, and animal nutrition and health markets. Verenium provides novel products to address a variety of commercial applications in these three key markets. Verenium continues to leverage its proprietary enzyme discovery and evolution technologies to develop products for application in a variety of industrial sectors. In many cases these efforts are in collaboration with blue chip industrial leaders such as BASF, Bunge, Cargill, Danisco and Syngenta, which provide strategic market positions.