About Us

Our goals and objectives

Industrial biotechnology is key to maintaining Europe's leading position in the global market for organic products and facilitating the transition towards a green and circular economy.
ROBUSTOO brings to bear the results of previous EU projects, which demonstrated the applicability of three oxidative enzymes – non-specific peroxygenases (UPO), laccases and hydroxymethylfurfural oxidases (HMFO) – to provide new and greener production of chemicals and materials biological origin.

The specific objectives of ROBUSTOO are:

  • Provide enzyme candidates superior to existing ones through parallel strategies based on in silico bioprospecting of genomic and protein sequence databases and computational redesign of existing and new bio-prospected enzymes.
  • Develop and compare different expression hosts at laboratory or benchtop scale, including bacteria, yeast, and filamentous fungi, for scalable and efficient production of selected enzymes.
  • Identify and engineer laccases, UPOs, and HMFOs with improved properties for target reactions through directed evolution and rational design based on in silico bioprospecting and design outcomes.
  • Optimize the reactions catalyzed by new and/or engineered enzymes on lignin, lipophilic, and furanic substrates to produce resins and additives, binding ingredients, plastic building blocks, and other compounds of biological origin.
  • Produce the best-performing laccase, UPO and HMFO enzymes at pilot scale in ad hoc expression hosts for subsequent validation.
  • Scale up targeted enzymatic reactions at the pilot scale to obtain products containing lignin, lipids, and sugar derivatives and evaluate and validate their technical and environmental feasibility.
  • Promote research and innovation by developing appropriate business plans for exploiting project results and communication and dissemination activities to reach a wider audience.

Our strategy 

To exploit their full industrial potential, large-scale production of the recombinant enzymes and development of new robust variants adapted to the harsh operating conditions are being addressed. ROBUSTOO consortium's most advanced technologies and know-how allows to conduct bioprospecting and computational enzyme design, develop microbial strains for industrial enzyme production and design improved enzymes to be applied on target biotransformations, concluding with the environmental and technical-economic assessment and exploitation of the developed technologies, all undertaken by Biotechnological SMEs and research/technological centres.

The new enzymes and biotransformations will represent revolutionary biotechnological solutions for: 

  • conversion of laccase-modified industrial lignins into 100% biobased resins such as wood panel adhesives and 3D printing additives, increasing the commercial value of existing lignin products
  • production of intermediate and fine chemical products difficult to obtain by chemical synthesis through regio/stereo-selective oxygenations of lipophilic substrates with UPO
  • synthesis of the building block 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid from 5-hydroxymethylfurfural using HMFO, as a sustainable alternative to chemical catalytic processes.
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Funded by the European Union
Grant Agreement No 101135166