Team:Groningen/stakeholderengagement
Meetings with companies
EV Biotech
The young, Groningen based biotech startup EV Biotech offered to collaborate with us in many aspects. Represented by Linda Dijkshoorn, Agnieszka Wegryzn and Sergey Lunev, EVBiotech was present at multiple meetings with our subgroups. Linda had great tips about structure and organisation, and helped us to set up a SCRUM way of working. Agnieszka is an expert on modelling and helped a great deal with the flux balance analysis. Sergey helped us to set up an idea to create a continuous bioreactor. Over the summer we had ten meeting with them to discuss our progress on the project. Next to technical help, we also had a great deal of help by accessing the big network of EV Biotech. As a special honor, we were invited to the official opening of the new EV Biotech office. Here we had the possibility to pitch our project to several experienced people in the business.
NRK: Martin van Dord (24th July 2018)
NRK is the Dutch Federation of plastic & rubber converters, with 20 different sub associations and 400 member companies. We talked to Martin van Dord, innovation consultant at NRK and Topsector Chemie. According the NRK facts and figures 2017 the use of bioplastics is ca 20 kiloton (1%) of the 2.000 kton used (2017). Main problem for the use of bioplastics is the price issue. The price is up twice as high as virgin plastics. In order to contribute to the goals of the Climat Agreement of Paris, the objective is to lift this percentage to 15% in 2030. Mr. van Dord thought our project was very interesting, since we find a new way to produce bioplastics. However, he was wondering why we would focus on styrene that much. Why not create a new bioplastic with even better qualities? He also stated the business case should be a part in the project in order to get a better insight in the potential of genetically manufactured/engineered bioplastics and the scale of economic feasible production facilities. NRK also put an article about us on their website
Bioclear Earth: Jeroen Tideman (27th July 2018)
We had contact with the employees of BioClear Earth, who gave us great tips on the financial aspects of our project. Because pure cellulose is more expensive than glucose, we needed to find a waste source which we could use in our process. They came up with the idea to use recycled toilet-paper, which can not be used for other purposes duo to its imago. After this, they explained to us how the market for enzymes works, and also brought us into contact with various people in the market. Next to the people from the enzyme field, they told us about various parties who are working on turning cellulose into glucose. Lastly they gave us the tip to use glucose instead of cellulose for our project. However, we thought this was not feasible as we do not want to be regarded as competition to the food industry.
KNN Cellulose: Yme Flapper(31st August 2018)
We've visited KNN Cellulose! After doing a lot of research in possibilities in biomass, we found a company which produces Recell® . This is an innovative new product from recycled toilet paper which consists for more than 90% out of cellulose. They asked us whether there is a possibility if we can use their product to create styrene. This way we really use waste streams to create StyGreen! The company develops biomass chemicals and is looking for new innovative and sustainable ways of production. GMO technology fits this profile. KNN provided us with a sample of their product so we can test, and they are very interested in our results.
Avantium: Ronny Pals (31st August 2018)
On 31.08. Rianne, Jens, Benno, Bram and team associate Tjerk Douma visited the Chemistry Park Delfzijl where we had a meeting with Avantium. Avantium is breaking down wood chips chemically to hemicellulose, glucose and lignin. Their technology furthermore allows them to break down cellulose with acid to glucose monomers in a one pot reaction with high yields while recovering the acid. We are trying to do exactly the same but enzymatically, employing our cellulosome. We agreed to test the suitability of the glucose Avantium made from wood chips for growth medium for s.cerevisiae. Beyond that we learned a lot about the process of valorizing innovations in general. They gave us a lot of insight regarding the financial and technical bottlenecks that stand between a promising idea and a large scale profitable industrial process. We were impressed by Avantiums technology as it is very robust, works with almost any type of wood and requires only very little material preparation, especially in comparison to our enzymatic approach. An important take away for us was therefore that we have to consider the expenses and environmental implications of our cellulose preparation (grinding, autoclaving, phosphorylating) as well, rather than just our yeast growing on cellulose.
BioBTX: Pieter Imhof (25th July 2018)
As suggested by the Science Shop, we got into contact with Pieter Imhof of BioBTX. This company is also making chemical intermediates out of biomass, but this company uses a chemical way of working. They explained to us how they use pyrolysis, and combined this by a catalytic conversion step. This way they were able to reach aromatics yields of approximately 30-70%, with BTX (Benzene, Toluene, Xylene) yields ranging from 5-40%, yielde dependent on feed and process condition used. On our project, Mr. Imhof thought that the process of turning glucose into styrene not have enough yields to be economically feasible. However, he thought the cellulose to glucose step in one pot combined with glucose to styrene could be a interesting improvement. Next to this, he explained that with every chemical step, there is more CO2 emission, the magnitude dependent on reaction conditions. So whereas our method would not be able to have industrial needs, it would likely be greener than the chemical process of refining biomass, and significantly better than fossil based. These steps are bound together in the Life Cycle Analysis, which can be found on the wiki and in given references. Mr. Imhof explained to us that we should not go into deep into this, and gave us great references about their own research.
Fablab: Winand Slingenbergh
As the iGEM team Groningen aims to produce styrene, a plastic monomer, making actual plastic products from our monomer was an obvious idea. As the quantities of styrene we managed to produce are not large enough for industrial applications we found an interesting partner in Fablab Groningen, a 3D printing venture. Fablab is an open-source, global network that originated from an MIT course titled ‘How to make almost anything’ they have stayed true to this ideal and offer a wide variety of plastic and wood working techniques in their laboratories. 3D printing with ABS plastic is possible, but it has some drawbacks, hence we decided to collaborate with Fablab Groningen without actually using StyGreen for 3D printing. We quickly realized that 3D printed biological structures can be of great educational value. Therefore we made prints of the most important enzymes in our project: The cellulose binding domain, the endogluconase, the beta-gluconase and the Phenylalanine Ammonia Lyase. We also printed some of their ligands and matched them size wise to showcase where the pocket with the active site in the enzyme is and which chemical alteration is happening. We also developed a kit of building blocks for styrene, butadiene, acrylnitril and divinylbenzene that can showcase the process of copolymerization through magnets. On top of that our mascot Styrene Steve was 3D printed multiple times and given as present to some of our sponsors as a nice gesture and to keep iGEM in people’s minds. All structures we designed with FabLab are open source and can be found on their website https://www.thingiverse.com/.
ZAP: Drs. R.J. van Linschoten (4th September 2018)
One of the first steps when considering upscaling is finding a suitable location for a pilot plant. The province of Groningen is a strong agricultural and industrial area. Therefore, the province of Groningen can support the conversion of waste streams from biomass in high-end products. ZAP stands for Zernike Advanced Processing. ZAP offers an unique test environment for bio-based experiments in the northern region of the Netherlands, they offer the facilities to setup a pilot plant. ZAP tries to act on the signal that we need to lessen our reliance on fossil fuels. ZAP is an innovation cluster which is located on the Zernike Campus of the University of Groningen, this can lead to a symbiotic relation between the knowledge of the university and the industry of the surrounding area. We met with drs. R.J. van Linschoten, director of the Zernike Advanced Processing, on the 4th of September. With him we discussed the prerequisites for setting up a pilot plant.
