ChassisCraft

Natural-derived products are widely used in cosmetics, food and medicine and since natural products are increasingly preferred over synthetic compounds, the demand and market size have grown. Natural products can be obtained from microorganisms, such as bacteria or yeast, but are also isolated from plants and animals with varying degrees of environmental impacts. Often low yields and the high cost of extraction can lead to insufficient supplies and high costs. Alternatively, chemical synthesis of these products is often not feasible due to the coproduction of undesirable stereoisomers or intermediates. There has been increased interest in engineering microorganisms to efficiently produce these natural products in a scalable and environmentally sustainable manner.
E. coli is one of the most versatile and well-characterized hosts for the biosynthesis of complex natural products, including alkaloids, terpenoids, polyketides, and phenylpropanoids. However, despite this versatility, many natural-derived products remain difficult or uneconomical to produce due to limitations in precursor availability, cofactor imbalance, pathway toxicity, and regulatory incompatibilities between heterologous pathways and native metabolism. Addressing these challenges increasingly requires the development of specialized chassis strains rather than one-off pathway engineering efforts.
Therefore, ChassisCraft will aim to solve this problem by creating optimized E. coli chassis to streamline natural product biosynthesis.