Important bio-chemical produced on a large scale by E.coli

If you had a company that manufactured valuable ingredients for chemicals like detergens or paint, you would probably like to produce the ingredients in large quantities, sustainably, and at a low cost. That's what researchers from The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability—DTU Biosustain—at DTU can now do. The researchers have developed an E. coli cell line, which produces large quantities of the compound serine. 

"This discovery is quite unique and proves that we can actually adapt cells to tolerate large amounts of serine—something many people thought wasn't possible. In order to develop these cells, we used highly specialized robots that exists only at our Center in Denmark and in the US," says Professor Alex Toftgaard Nielsen from DTU Biosustain.

Serine is an amino acid important for humans, because it is one of the 20 amino acids forming proteins in our bodies. Being highly water soluble, serine finds application as moisturizer in lotions of pharma and cosmetic industry.

Further, there is a huge marked for serine in the chemical industry, because is can be converted into other chemicals such as plastics, detergents, dietary supplements and a variety of other products.

In fact, serine has been mentioned as one of the 30 most promising biological substances to replace chemicals from the oil industry, if the production costs can be reduced.

Fermentation by bacteria is the most common method of producing amino acids. However, serine is toxic to the laboratory work horse E. coli, which quickly "gives up", if the bacterium is to produce large amounts of the substance.