ROBOX

  This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 635734.  

Title

Expanding the industrial use of Robust Oxidative Biocatalysts for the conversion and production of alcohols

Concept

Oxygen functionalities are key functional groups in many of today’s chemicals and materials. The efficient introduction of oxygen-functionalities into raw materials are key chemical transformations in bulk and fine chemicals. Innovative bio-catalytic oxidation routes using molecular oxygen (from air) under benign and mild (pH) conditions such as ambient temperature and pressure can greatly improve the sustainability and economics of processes, but were so far mainly been applied in the pharma segments. In this segment, the enzyme-catalyzed step often represents the highest added value and the high price of the end-product (more than 1000 euros per kilogram) justifies less than optimal enzyme production and limitations in its catalytic efficiency.

In order to achieve the widening of industrial application of enzymatic bio-oxidation processes to also larger volume but lower price chemical markets, ROBOX will demonstrate the techno-economic viability of bio-transformations of four types of robust oxidative enzymes: P450 monooxygenases (P450s), Baeyer-Villiger MonoOxygenase (BVMOs), Alcohol DeHydrogenase (ADH) and Alcohol OXidase (AOX) for which target reactions have already been validated on lab-scale in pharma, nutrition, fine & specialty chemicals and materials applications. ROBOX will demonstrate 11 target reactions on large scale for these markets in order to prepare them for scale up to commercial-scale plants.

Participants

• Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands (Coordinator)
• Givaudan Suisse SA, Switzerland
• Chemstream BVBA, Belgium
• Dyadic Nederland B.V., Netherlands (Participation ended)
• c-LEcta GmbH, Germany
• evoxx technologies GmbH, Germany
• LentiKat’s a.s., Czechia (Participation ended)
• ACIB GmbH, Austria
• Technische Universität Graz, Austria
• DSM Chemical Technology R&D B.V., Netherlands (Participation ended)
• Università degli studi di Pavia, Italy
• The University of Manchester, United Kingdom
• Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, Denmark
• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Angewandten Forschung e.V., Germany
• Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland
• Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
• PNO Consultants B.V., Netherlands
• Genencor International B.V., Netherlands
• InnoSyn B.V., Netherlands