The paper was published in ACS Chemical Biology (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cb300634b).

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Plant-based ingredients are used extensively in a variety of consumer goods as flavors, fragrances, food ingredients, and pharmaceuticals, and as such, there has been great excitement in the potential of manufacturing these ingredients through microbial fermentation. Although there exist early examples on the application of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology principles towards the production of these secondary metabolites, there has been significantly less attention on the role of enzyme optimization in engineering these biocatalysts. In their paper, Manus Bio scientists highlight the importance of integrating protein engineering with these other disciplines in order to develop highly productive commercial strains for biomanufacturing.

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“Our past work has clearly demonstrated the pivotal role that enzyme optimization plays in engineering efficient microbial biocatalysts for the production of rare secondary metabolites,” said Dr. Ajikumar Parayil, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Manus. “Our work capitalizes on these early studies by taking a multi-disciplinary approach spanning metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and protein engineering, thus enabling an efficient and low-cost platform for commercial strain development.”