Brain Biotech and Bonumose collaborate on enzymes

Brain Biotech, a leading European industrial biotechnology specialist, and rare sugars expert Bonumose, have teamed up to improve the performance of several enzymes that catalyse cascade reactions in the continuous production of low-calorie, ultra low-glycemic, naturally occurring sweeteners.

Bonumose has developed a patented process for producing tagatose and allulose, which the company says “eliminates several processing steps and significantly increases yields” during the production process. The company uses multiple enzymes within the synthesis cascades and Brain Biotech is optimising several of these enzymes using enzyme engineering.

Patrick Lorenz, vice president, strategic initiatives bioscience at Brain Biotech said Brain Biotech´s enzyme technology suite has “once again” proven to deliver on customers’ challenging protein engineering targets.

“Based on rational structure- and sequence-guided design we improved individual enzymes and their cumulative performance in cascades to better match production process requirements,” Lorenz said. “The ultimate aim is making production of Bonumose´s beneficial rare sugars even more cost efficient.”

Ed Rogers, co-founder and CEO at Bonumose, added that tagatose and allulose have 92% and 70% the sweetness of sucrose but only 38% and 10% of the calories.

“Our mission is to produce them in a low cost production process from commodity carbohydrates,” Rogers said. “Our development collaborator Brain Biotech has passed the third milestone in the collaboration and thanks to their enzyme engineering, analytics and enzyme assay expertise we are on track and confident to meet our developmental objectives.”

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