SBIR Phase I: Production of capsaicinoids from microorganisms.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the development of a novel production technology for capsaicin, a high value plant natural product with applications in the food, pharmaceutical, and deterrent industries. Most capsaicin today is made near chili pepper farms with access to low cost labor, primarily in India and China. The supply of capsaicin is impacted by weather variations resulting in large fluctuations in both quality and quantity of capsaicin on the market. The proposed microbial fermentation technology offers several solutions. Fermentation can be deployed worldwide and can fulfill sudden market demand in days rather than months. It enables tight control over the manufacturing process providing a consistent quality product. More importantly, this technology has the potential to deliver capsaicin at a price that enables market expansion and development of new applications. Commercialization of such technologies will not only solidify the leading role of the United States in synthetic biology research but also will create high tech jobs while making globally competitive products. This SBIR Phase I project is a proposal to demonstrate the bioproduction of capsaicinoids by fermentation in a microbial host. Capsaicin is currently manufactured through chemical extraction from chili peppers. The process is inefficient and expensive. Recent advancements in synthetic biology offer the ability to engineer non-native biochemical pathways into microorganisms and produce chemicals using fermentation. In this proposal, the capsaicinoid biosynthetic pathway will be engineered into a microbial host and cultivated using a fermentation strategy that results in a faster time-to-market while maintaining a strong economic advantage. The experimental approach utilizes multivariate metabolic engineering approaches in order to arrive at optimal solutions in the most time and cost effective way. Successful demonstration of a functional capsaicinoid pathway will enable more complex engineering efforts of natural products and will greatly improve the understanding of this pathway in plants. Moreover, the synthetic biology tools discovered during the course of this research and the application of data science to synthetic biology have the potential to rapidly accelerate innovation in this field.