Sustainable production of microbial biosurfactants from 2nd generation feedstocks by strain- and process engineering

Agro and food industries generate various side- and waste streams that, in addition to being an economic loss, also contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases and to a substantial waste of resources. Apart from offering solutions for the issues above, microbial conversion of food waste to value-added products like microbial biosurfactants will reduce the carbon footprint and price of these products, as it replaces first-generation substrates that are the main contributors to cost and impact. In order to achieve this goal, strain- and process engineering has been applied to enable the use of different waste streams as feedstock for the yeast Starmerella bombicola. S. bombicola is a natural producer of sophorolipids, a class of glycolipid biosurfactants consisting of a hydrophilic sophorose group attached to a hydrophobic fatty acid tail. Within this research, in the framework of the European BBI-JU funded WASTE2FUNC project and the FWO SB scholarship of ir. T. Van de Craen, the focus lays on various new-to-nature biosurfactants produced by modified S. bombicola strains. These novel biosurfactants are similar to sophorolipids but contain other functionalities that help to further broaden the application range of glycolipid biosurfactants . Physical and enzymatic pretreatment methods for the waste streams as well as genetic engineering towards achieving higher productivities of these new-to-nature biosurfactants are investigated. The final goal is to develop scalable, economic and sustainable production processes for novel glycolipid biosurfactants