For decades, scientific breakthroughs and technological progress in biotechnology have empowered the notion of the bioeconomy, in which biomass is used to produce society’s energy, chemicals and materials. More than that, the bioeconomy has been postulated as a crucial component in the much-needed transition to a more sustainable world -- one that is, above all, less dependent on fossil fuels. But despite the promises and progress of biotech, the bioeconomy has far from realised its full potential. In part, the biorefineries that are supposed to provide the foundation of a sustainable bioeconomy simply don’t exist yet; classic bioproduction methods often rely on feedstock that competes with arable land, while ‘green’ solutions using cyanobacteria lack the required productivity or are vexed by issues of genetic instability.

In our iGEM project, we aim to tackle this issue by developing an enabling technology for self-sustaining biorefineries based on a synthetic consortium of phototrophs and chemotrophs for the stable production of virtually any product for which the latter can be engineered. The idea is simpler than the last sentence: Synechocystis, a cyanobacterium that requires CO2 and light to grow, is designed to produce and share sugars, which can be used by a chemotroph, like E. coli or yeast, for the production of an end-product, like a biofuel of specialty chemical. We’re essentially coupling a biotechnological sustainability module - a photosynthesis-based engine of microbial fuel production - to traditionally unsustainable but better-established methods of high-yield bioproduction via chemotroph fermentation. In the following application scenarios, we contextualize possible applications of this technology by describing three companies whose business model is based on it.

Founded by the original 2015 iGEM team, Duosion Green Technology (DGT) is a microbial consortium engineering company that develops ecosystems consisting of microbial strains to produce compounds in a more sustainable way through the addition of the cyanobacterial solar-to-chemical energy module or more complex products through distributed metabolic pathways. Duosion licenses these custom strains to leading producers, which use the engineered consortium strains in their bioreactors to produce a desired end product.