ExpectedOutcome:
A successful proposal will contribute to Destination ‘Circular economy and bioeconomy sectors’ impacts, in line with the European Green Deal, the EU bioeconomy strategy & its action plan as well as the EU industrial strategy. A proposal is expected to address in particular: i) developing innovative and sustainable value-chains in the bio-based sectors and ii) enhancing European industrial sustainability, competitiveness and resource independence. Expected impacts will be achieved via research and innovation on industrial biotechnology and other enabling technologies, as a prerequisite and driver of future solutions for the bioeconomy transition.
Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes:
- Enhanced EU bio-based sector competitiveness, sustainability and resource independence, including SMEs. More specifically, successful projects will contribute to a paradigm shift from enzymes and industrial microbial-hosts dependent processes to evolved microbial hosts and enzymes, for improved (bio-based) process/production robustness and flexibility.
- Enabling environmental performance improvements of bio-based processes (encompassing climate-neutrality, circularity and zero pollution) through resource efficient valorisation of sustainable biomass feedstock, while addressing pollution issues in production processes.
- Long-term benefits to the bio-based sector, consumers and end-users, by more environmentally-friendly as well as more technically and economically feasible applications in diverse value chains, also underpinned by progress in industrial biotechnology.
Scope:
The overall scope focuses on widening the range of known robust enzymatic catalysts and industrial microbial hosts,[1] as well as on the potential of scaling up their deployment and thus exploring their potential to offer significant gains in bio-based processes and their flexibility against variable process parameters, namely: resource efficiency, energy efficiency and other process metrics. These efforts will then eventually aim for development of novel, or significantly optimised, sustainable (bio-based) processes and products (e.g. chemicals, materials).
Proposals should address:
- Identification and bioprospecting of novel natural enzymes and/or microbial hosts, including though the use of existing sequencing data, from all types of environments (especially terrestrial but also marine).[2] The identified solutions must especially address extreme habitats (relevant to bio-based processes conditions/ challenges-see next point).
- Optimisation of enzymes’ and/or microbial hosts’ properties for industrial use, addressing (bio-based) process conditions barriers. Such barriers comprise of physical parameters (e.g., temperature, pH) and chemical parameters/stressors (e.g., solvents, variable biomass feedstock composition, contaminants etc.). Optimisation efforts may include understanding, modification and control of microbial hosts and enzymes, (e.g. via Synthetic Biology methodologies).
- Testing and demonstrating of novel concepts for industrial enzyme-catalysed or microbial host-based processes (e.g., engineering of enzyme cascades/multi-enzyme reactions, co-factor regeneration, broader range of functional activity etc.) to valorise biomass and produce high-value bio-based products.
- Demonstrating optimised process design, development and control aspects, with considerations for implementation of automation, integration of unit operations, robust and precise process analytical technologies (PAT), and the horizontal incorporation of enabling digital technologies, where necessary for improving process efficiency but also achieving environmental performance improvements.
- Assessment of the tested, optimized enzyme-catalysed or microbial host-based processes with respect to biotechnological, economic, environmental performance (lifecycle assessment) as well as safety parameters and standards.
- Linking to the ongoing work on sustainability improvements via industrial biotechnology[3], if underpinned by the thematic focus on enzymes.
- Beneficiaries should pay attention to the delivery of FAIR data, results and methodologies.
Where relevant, proposals should overall seek links and synergies as well as capitalise on the results of past and ongoing EU research projects[4] of Horizon 2020, LIFE, Horizon Europe (including the Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU) /Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU)).
Proposals should also include a dedicated task, appropriate resources and a plan on how they will collaborate with other projects funded under this topic and other relevant topics.
In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.
Specific Topic Conditions:
Activities are expected to achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.
[1]Microbial-hosts: both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms such as fungi.
[2]For marine environments, please consider any relevant past or ongoing topics under heading ‘Innovating for blue bioeconomy and biotechnology value chains (e.g. HORIZON-CL6-2024-CircBio-01-10: Targeting aquatic extremophiles for sourcing novel enzymes, drugs, metabolites and chemicals
[3] See parallel topic HORIZON-CL6-2023-ZEROPOLLUTION-01-5: Industrial biotechnology approaches for improved sustainability and output of industrial bio-based processes.
[4]In particular Horizon 2020 call FNR-16-2020 topic ‘Enzymes for more environment-friendly consumer products’, H2020-FNR-16-2020 projects, such as: EnXylaScope – ‘Mining Microbes and Developing Advanced Production Platforms for Novel Enzymes To Rapidly Unleash Xylans’ Potential In a Scope Of Products For the Consumer Market; FuturEnzyme - Technologies of the Future for Low-Cost Enzymes for Environment-Friendly Products, RADICALZ ‘Rapid discovery and development of enzymes for novel and greener consumer products’.
