Decarbonizing our economies in the race to fight climate change demands a wholesale overhauling of all sorts of production processes to make them as sustainable as possible. Greening chemicals, which are used as ingredients in all sorts of products, is where U.K. startup Deep Blue BioTech is putting its energies.
The biotech startup founded in May 2023 is building a business around a photosynthesis-based form of biomanufacturing that will enable it to manufacture chemicals in a more environmentally friendly way than conventional production methods, such as refining fossil fuels.
The startup also claims its method can achieve cost parity with conventional chemical production since the genetically engineered microorganism it’s using to produce the chemicals only requires feeding with relatively cheap ingredients: light, water, and CO 2 .
It says this contrasts favorably with precision fermentation, another microbe-based production method that requires more costly feedstock (such as sugar), too.
Cyanobacteria
Deep Blue BioTech is working with a strain of cyanobacteria — also known as blue-green algae (but note these single-celled microorganisms are actually prokaryotes, rather than algae) — using genetic engineering and computational modeling to turn bacteria that is sometimes
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