ATCC, the world’s premier biological materials management and standards organization, today announced that it has been granted a contract with Capra Biosciences, a Virginia-based biotech company focused on the cost-competitive production of petrochemical replacements using its modular bioreactor platform. ATCC is supporting a contract with Capra to work on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Switch program. This initiative directly supports growth of the U.S. bioeconomy and aligns with the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology’s recent call for accelerated investment in biomanufacturing to strengthen national security, economic resilience, and global competitiveness. By advancing innovative microbial engineering and feedstock-flexible biomanufacturing, the project will help catalyze U.S. leadership in biotechnology innovation, enabling scalable, locally produced alternatives to petroleum-based products and reinforcing the nation’s position at the forefront of the global bioindustrial revolution.
Currently, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) relies on petrochemicals as the source of carbon-containing molecules required for virtually every aspect of its operations – they are the building blocks for diverse products such as food, pharmaceuticals, fuel, textiles, and more. Petrochemical manufacturing is dependent on foreign supply chains, and its manufacturing practices lack agility and reproducibility. Alternative technologies, like biomanufacturing, can produce similar organic commodities to petrochemicals, but they are developed to optimize yield at the cost of flexibility and only produce a single commodity. Switch aims to create a suite of tools and approaches to engineer run-time reprogrammable microorganisms that support a variety of possible biomanufacturing processes that will have greater supply chain security, flexibility of input/output, and reduced costs, as well as sustainability. The program will enable four Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) for biomanufacturing that provide novel capabilities for national security.
Capra, the primary contractor, is focused specifically on one CONOPS – ‘opportunistic consumption’ by switching between feedstocks – and is collaborating with ATCC, Virginia Tech, Syracuse University, and Next Rung Technology on a unique innovative solution. This project, known as Transcriptomics and OptoGenetics for Lipid Expression (TOGLE), will enable real-time process control based on feedstock composition using a single organism. The TOGLE team will leverage ATCC’s extensive library of microbial strains, as well as its expertise in functional genomics and transcriptomics, to identify genetic components with desired traits. These components will be metabolically engineered into the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to switch between at least 16 different feedstocks to synthesize free fatty acids, as a precursor for synthetic aviation fuel or lubricants for the DoD. Y. lipolytica was chosen as the base organism because of its versatility and robustness in various industrial applications. Base strains developed as part of this initiative will be available to the scientific community through ATCC’s culture collection.
“This collaboration with Capra is our first in industrial biomanufacturing and we believe that we are well equipped to help researchers navigate and overcome complex problems in this area,” said ATCC Federal Solutions Senior Vice President Rebecca Bradford, MBA, MS, PMP. “With our expansive biorepository, scientists have the capability to use our strains to design and potentially develop new and unique metabolic pathways that can be optimized for biochemical production.”
ATCC has developed robust computational tools for identifying genes associated with infection in transcriptomics datasets. These tools will be adapted as part of this project with Capra to identify genes and gene clusters associated with feedstock metabolism. Additionally, the ATCC Genome Portal is a database of 5,500 high-quality reference genomes from authenticated microbial strains in the ATCC collection. Through this cloud-based platform, researchers can easily access and securely download meticulously curated whole-genome sequences to confidently perform bioinformatics analyses and make insightful correlations.
The success of this project will yield a new capability to rapidly switch bioproduction among feedstocks at the point of need that will be ready to be scaled to pilot manufacturing and/or tested in mission-relevant environments in Capra’s bioreactor platform.
“By contributing our well-characterized strains for biomanufacturing and in-house expertise in genomics and bioinformatics, we are helping to not only drive innovation in industrial biomanufacturing but also catalyze growth in the U.S. bioeconomy,” said ATCC President and Chief Executive Officer Ruth R. Cheng, PhD.
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