FabricNano

2022年10月31日

FabricNano说,它找到了一种可行的方法来交换石化对植物和蛋白质。照片:弗朗西斯科·法令/盖蒂图片社revist本文中,访问我的资料,然后查看保存的故事。如果你想知道制造业的未来是什么样子的,所有你需要做的是访问的四楼砖建筑在伦敦卡姆登区。在生物安全二级实验室从改装获得一半的开放式办公室,化学家和生物学家在护目镜和白色外套正忙着操作笨重的机械和解析的内容反应堆和大桶装满厚厚的黄色的粘性。另一边的实验室的厚玻璃分区,员工运动帽衫和饮食从Itsu午餐盒确认我们仍然在伦敦的总部科技创业公司。它的名字叫FabricNano。2018年出生的“启动工厂”加速器企业家第一,公司的目标则改变中提取的石化产品的生产和发酵materials-chief其中包括:塑料的利用生物组件。换句话说,如果FabricNano有它的方式,公司生产塑料将石油和使用蛋白质而不是抛弃。“大化工企业,其中一些是我们的客户,想要在成本平价生物塑料PET塑料之类的东西,”格兰特亚伦解释说,公司的创始人和首席执行官。”,如果你使用生物塑料,它更可降解。” The process for creating products and materials by harnessing enzymes (proteins with the ability to accelerate chemical reactions) is well known: The ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup that infests US foodstuffs is made by mixing cornstarch with a trio of proteins. “It looks like an assembly line: like, you’re just taking your input chemical, your feedstock. You’re putting it into the enzyme, handing it off to the next one, and making an ultimate product,” says FabricNano vice president for operations Eliza Eddison. “We can’t help but see it like Henry Ford’s assembly line.” But when it comes to producing more sophisticated materials such as plastic, biomanufacturing falls short. Most of the proteins used to trigger these reactions are destroyed or degraded in the process, making it too expensive to make stuff at scale. It is by addressing that issue that FabricNano hopes to jump-start the industry and make it competitive. The secret, Aarons says, was finding the right kind of support to bind the proteins to. “If you put them physically on to a surface, you change the geometry of the protein,” he explains. “So it changes and it doesn’t work anymore.” FabricNano’s idea was to bind proteins to strands of lab-made DNA, a material that had never been seriously experimented with in the industry. The team—which at the time still comprised cofounder Ferdinando Randisi, who had studied DNA theoretical biophysics at the University of Oxford—found that, indeed, when bound to a DNA scaffolding, the proteins did not get damaged, allowing them to keep working for much longer, making biomanufacturing cheaper. “The proteins are not hurt when they sit on the DNA,” Aarons says. The company managed to bring down the cost of DNA production significantly—yet it eventually realized that relying on DNA would always be too expensive for industrial-scale production. Eventually, however, FabricNano found a way to parlay the intuition underpinning its DNA-based work into a method that has the same benefits, but does not require using DNA. “We were able to move away from DNA and still retain this innovation in this benefit,” Aarons says. “It’s the same principle, but with a different support.” How exactly this system works FabricNano will not say, as the relevant patent registrations have not been finalized yet. But chemical, pharmaceutical, and engineering companies—including chemical giant Sumitomo Chemical America—have already started partnering with FabricNano. “We envision operating effectively at an industrial scale within three years,” Eddison says. On November 2, 2022, FabricNano’s CEO and cofounder Grant Aarons will be speaking at WIRED Impact, Europe’s leading one-day event examining the fast-changing world of sustainability and ESG. Find out more and book your ticket here. This article appears in the November/December 2022 issue of WIRED UK magazine. Most Popular