Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) It was styled as a biofuels and biochemical producer, founded back in the heady days of the Recovery Act in February 2009, focused on developing high value oils and animal feeds by fermentation of low cost substrates. The business, as former CEO Colin South once described it, was “focused on integration of process enabling technologies, value add oils and high protein animal feed by-products.” It raised a trackable $14.7M between May 2009 and October 2013.

It was Novogy, which sputtered a bit in the actual production of oils and feeds, but never failed to intrigue in the platform it developed to do same. Novogy was ultimately acquired by Total in August 2014 for an undisclosed price. Now Ginkgo BioWorks has acquired it, for an undisclosed price.

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So, what can we say about Novogy? It always struck us as in the class of companies that included LS9 or Allylix. All three were potentially monster technologies that became absorbed through acquisition — LS9 disappeared into Renewable Energy Group and thence became part of Genomatica. Allylix disappeared into Evolva. We miss them both.

LS9 worked in e.coli bacteria but was focused on producing oils. Allylix had this amazing ability in strain engineering relating to yeast. So, Novogy was not unrelated in terms of technology. Lipids and yeast are at the heart of it. Novogy had developed the ability to produce a class of oleaginous yeasts — a source for sustainable fats and oils. They have been Wizards of Yeast.

And what might Ginkgo be doing with the assets, IP portfolio, codebase and technical team — which is to say, the tangible assets and not the commercial ones? Ginkgo will be “leveraging those to accelerate and scale development of a range of bio-based commodities, fine chemicals and materials, as part of a push towards the creation of more environmentally-friendly biofuels.”

Let’s look into that just a bit. And meanwhile, can I introduce you to a good but very small friend of mine, Yarrowia lipolytica, named for its fondness for eating lipids, although it’s become more recently famous for producing them.

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When you feed carboxylic acids to them, presto, Mikey likes it, so says this recent research paper.

In this case, it produces really interesting lipids. Not your Dad’s lipo fat — this is the high-end stuff. Fat gold, if you will. And engineers have dialed in an ability to produce different kinds of oils — so, it’s a very, very small but flexible fat factory.

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Oleaginous yeasts natively produce surplus triacylglycerol lipid and can be engineered for higher yield and productivity. Most enzymatic steps of triacylglycerol production are characterized, but key parts of the pathway remain unknown. This introduces uncertainty to metabolic engineering strategy and the upper limit of achievable lipid yield.   READ MORE