The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to produce low-cost and customizable aromas that are inspired by plant extracts. The fragrance industry uses fragrant extracts from flowers and other plant materials as basic building blocks for haute-couture finished fragrances. These extracts are expensive due to the limited availability of suitable plant materials, and due to the fact that the extracts are too complicated to replicate by mixing pure chemicals. This project will generate novel fragrance blends via fermentation ("cultured aromas"). These cultured aromas will be customized for the exacting requirements of professional perfumers, offering a degree of creativity that does not exist with plant extracts. This technology will present a disruptive entry into the multi-billion dollar market for finished fragrances. Beyond fragrances, this technology will allow the development of new customizable extracts with the beneficial properties of plant extracts, including flavors, dyes, and antioxidant activity.
This SBIR Phase I project proposes to apply advanced synthetic biology tools to produce sustainable alternatives to complex plant extracts. Conventional metabolic engineering projects focus on the optimized production of a single target compound; this project instead will engineer microbial strains that produce a range of components found in high-value plant extracts used in the fragrance industry. The goal is to rapidly screen and characterize novel plant enzymes for use in conjunction with existing strains that produce key fragrance molecules. These novel enzymes are expected to produce multiple fragrance molecules and the profile of the resulting blends will be compared to those derived from plants via high throughput metabolomics. The cultured aroma blends can then be customized to a perfumers' specification by tuning the biosynthetic pathways.
