Formulating New Cellulases for Diverse Markets: Defining QA Parameters

The US is targeting the goal of 36 billion gallons of liquid transportation biofuels by 2022. Currently we produce approximately 10 billion gallons of ethanol from corn starch. In order to produce the remaining 26 billion gallons of liquid biofuels from cellulosic sources two major problems need to be solved, the logistics of crop production and the million tons of enzymes necessary to deconstruct those crops. Absolutely, the major limitation for reaching the US transportation goal is the cost and production capacity of enzymes. Current enzyme production is based on microbial fermentation, a technology that will require billions of up-front capitalization to create the infrastructure to produce over a million tons of cellulases. Infinite Enzymes, LLC has a solution to resolve this limitation by using the plant biofactory to inexpensively produce cellulases without infrastructure investment. Infinite Enzymes, LLC, (www.infiniteenzymes.com; IE) is using the corn seed biofactory to produce cellulases to enable rapid integration of these enzymes into biofuels R & D, process development and large-scale commercial applications. Our plan is to enter the reagent market first to obtain revenues to move forward into higher volume markets. However, a need exists to establish that they are equivalent to what is currently being used. How do transgenic plant-based sources affect the behavior of the cellulase compared to the native fungal source We proposed to isolate clean enzyme from corn grain and test it for relevant activity in digestion of biomass. At the end of this project, IE will have product that can produce revenues for the company to develop products for larger markets that enable economical production of biofuels and other renewable resources.