DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences - When ‘Best-of-Both’ Traits Shine

by Tom Bryan (Ethanol Producer Magazine) ... DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences, building on years of success with its high-yield, GA-expressing yeasts, is making the previously divergent characteristics of high yield and superior robustness—packaged together—a reality.

“What we’ve seen in this industry is that you’re either going after yield or robustness,” says Lee Robinson, an application scientist at DuPont’s Applied Innovation Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “There wasn’t much of a middle ground. The line between yield and robustness had to be walked with known consequences: engineering yeasts for yield came at the expense of robustness, and vice versa. But our newest line of yeasts from the XCELIS® platform, the SYNERXIA® Gemstone Collection, is changing that by creating a best-in-class combination of both yield and robustness.”

Robinson says DuPont began its latest journey to develop new yeasts with “good base genetics” that allowed its scientists to drive more robustness into the SYNERXIA® Gemstone Collection. “That’s where we really pushed hard,” he says. “We leveraged a set of very diverse genetic yeast backgrounds, and by mating our current high-yield yeast with an exceptionally robust yeast, we produced hybrid yeast strains with incredible genetic diversity.”

The resultant yeasts were then screened for performance under various stress conditions such as temperature and organic acid tolerance—“the type of stresses they would see at an ethanol plant,” Robinson says. “And after applying that stress and seeing what resulted, we were able to pick two winners.” READ MORE