Whether a factory can make a profit, whether its products are reliable, and whether it can expand its scale – these largely depend on its “capabilities”.
Specifically, its significance is reflected in the following aspects:
1、Cut costs and boost efficiency for factories
Biomanufacturing relies on microorganisms to “consume raw materials and produce products”. High-performance strains can utilize raw materials more fully and yield products faster, directly maximizing production efficiency.
Take hyaluronic acid (HA) production as an example. In the past, ordinary it could only produce 5–8 grams of HA per liter of fermentation broth, while high-yield it can raise the output to 15–20 grams, doubling the yield.
Moreover, fermentation time can be significantly shortened. For lactic acid production, high-performance it can complete the process in 24 hours—twice as fast as traditional strains. This allows fermentation tanks to increase annual output by 40%, achieving a qualitative leap in equipment utilization rate and production capacity.
2、Ensure “product quality”.
In industrial production, “batch fluctuations” and “high impurity levels” are the biggest concerns. A superior strain is the “ballast stone” for ensuring quality and will never easily fail. For example, in the production of penicillin, the penicillin produced by high-performance it has only 5% of by-products, while that of ordinary strains can reach as high as 20%. With fewer by-products, the subsequent purification steps can be directly reduced by half, significantly lowering the cost.
Moreover, a good strain is “stable in nature”, and after several generations of propagation, it can still maintain stable high yield. It will not suddenly experience a sharp decline in yield or exceed the impurity limit in a certain batch, completely avoiding the huge loss of scrapping entire batches of products in the factory.
3、Help factories break through the capacity limit and even create new production paths.
Some products were previously impossible to be industrialized. The core bottleneck was the lack of good bacterial strains. For example, the precursor of artemisinin was previously extracted by growing Artemisia annua, with low output and dependent on weather conditions. After researchers modified the yeast, the yeast could efficiently synthesize artemisinic acid, instantly increasing the production capacity to the thousands of tons level, completely eliminating the reliance on natural raw materials.
There were also special bacterial strains that could tolerate high salt levels. They could directly use industrial wastewater with salt content as the culture medium, saving precious water resources and also treating industrial wastewater, which is equivalent to “turning waste into treasure”, achieving two benefits at once.
4、Achieve Green and Sustainable Production, Aligning with the Dual Carbon Goals.
Factories nowadays are all worried about exceeding pollutant discharge limits and carbon emission thresholds, and high-performance strains can perfectly solve this problem.
Take citric acid production as an example. High-performance strains generate fewer by-products, reducing pollutants in wastewater by 40% and cutting wastewater treatment costs significantly.What’s more, biomanufacturing itself is more low-carbon than chemical synthesis, and high-performance strains can further lower carbon emissions.
For instance, in the production of 1,3-propanediol, the fermentation method emits 6 tons less CO₂ per ton of product compared with the chemical synthesis method.This fully meets the current strict environmental protection requirements, making factory production more compliant and eco-friendly.
In the end, biomanufacturing factories live off their strains. High-performance strains are the core trump card that allows factories to earn more profits and make their products more competitive.
Currently, the whole world is racing to use synthetic biology technology to modify strains. This is essentially a scramble for the core advantage that defines the industry landscape. Whoever masters high-performance strains will seize the initiative in the biomanufacturing race.
Regarding Bailun
Bailun promotes the intelligentization of bioreactors, builds a large-scale bioreaction model and an end-to-end platform for synthetic biology from “strains to industrial production”, constructs a precise fermentation big data cloud, gathers massive reaction data, and conducts real-time monitoring, analysis and prediction of fermentation parameters and substance changes, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of synthetic biology research and development, and promoting the intelligent, efficient and sustainable development of the bioindustry. 联系我们
