Sphere Fluidics’ Pico-Mine platform chosen by Biosyntia to accelerate synthetic biology and metabolic workflows
26 Jun 2023
Sphere Fluidics, a company developing single cell analysis systems, recently announced Biosyntia, a biotechnology company focused on synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, has adopted the Pico-Mine® platform within its workflows. The platform was chosen by Biosyntia to harness its ultra-high-throughput, picodroplet-based screening capabilities, to accelerate development of novel industrially-relevant cell factories and advance bio-based production of nutritional ingredients.
By developing tailored processes based on biocatalysis, Biosyntia’s technologies enable the production of complex chemical compounds by fermentation, to support more sustainable and cost-effective manufacturing processes for active ingredients in vitamins and plant-derived bioactives. One of the Biosyntia's unique approaches to developing state-of-the-art cell factories for precision fermentation is the use of genetically encoded biosensors. However, traditional uses of these tools, such as flow cytometry cell sorting, are based on sensing internal product concentrations. Droplet-based screening capable with Sphere Fluidics’ picodroplet incubation platforms allows miniaturization of the fermentation process to the nanoliter scale, with direct sensing of extracellular product concentrations, and easy single-cell isolation of improved production strains.
Within the first months of using the Pico-Mine platform with Biosyntia’s proprietary B-vitamin biosensor, Biosyntia has been able to identify improved genetic variants of its leading B-vitamin production strain at unprecedented speeds, which are now in upscaling processes for precision fermentation of sustainable and natural B vitamins. The technology will be applied to further molecules, beyond B vitamins, and will be fundamental to Biosyntia's R&D strategy moving forward.
Pico-Mine is a semi-automated platform from Sphere Fluidics’ range of single-cell analysis systems, designed with additional flexibility to support earlier-stage research, harnessing the Biosyntia's proprietary picodroplet technology. It facilitates multiple custom-built functions to be integrated into complex workflows, including cell encapsulation in picodroplets and subsequent incubation, splitting, injection, and sorting. Pico-Mine enables precise analysis and sorting of large libraries in a matter of hours, at a low cost.