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EU pro­ject: OXYGREEN

13.02.2013
In nature, all life depends on one simple thing: the abil­ity of organ­isms to carry out a cease­less flow of highly var­ied and spe­cial­ised chem­ic­al reac­tions. At the heart of all these reac­tions sits nature’s ​‘secret weapon’ — enzymes. These are pro­teins which act as cata­lysts, allow­ing the reac­tions to take place at a rate which is simply unachiev­able with ​‘clas­sic­al’ chem­ic­al methods. In mod­ern indus­tries like phar­ma­ceut­ic­als, food and agri­cul­tur­al sci­ence, key man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses depend on the same type of chem­ic­al reac­tions to those which occur in liv­ing organ­isms. The dif­fer­ence, unfor­tu­nately, is that for these reac­tions the immense cata­lys­ing power of enzymes is not avail­able. The enzymes don’t exist. Or if they do, they are not avail­able on a scale suit­able for indus­tri­al use. If such enzymes could some­how be engin­eered, they could trans­form the effi­ciency and per­form­ance of many indus­tries and open up the pro­spect of a range of new products hitherto impossible to pro­duce on any sig­ni­fic­ant scale. This task — find­ing a way to engin­eer nature’s enzymes to cre­ate new ​‘design­er’ enzymes, able to meet the needs of spe­cif­ic indus­tri­al pro­cesses – was the mis­sion of OXY­GREEN, a five-year European research pro­ject sup­por­ted by 5.5 mil­lion euros of fund­ing from the European Com­mis­sion (EC). Start­ing work in 2008, the pro­ject brought togeth­er 12 part­ners includ­ing uni­ver­sit­ies, research insti­tutes and com­mer­cial enter­prises from The Neth­er­lands, Ger­many, Aus­tria, Italy, France and Poland. Spe­cific­ally, the con­sor­ti­um focused on enzymes that use oxy­gen to carry out reac­tions, since these are among the most widely used and rel­ev­ant chem­ic­al reac­tions for industry. Import­antly, the bene­fits of engin­eer­ing these new ​‘oxid­at­ive’ enzymes could extend well bey­ond the spe­cif­ic indus­tries con­cerned. They could also have an import­ant ​‘green’ impact – hence the project’s name. Until now, oxid­a­tion pro­cesses used in industry, based on the use of chem­ic­al as opposed to bio­lo­gic­al cata­lysts, have typ­ic­ally been energy-intens­ive and envir­on­ment­ally unfriendly, using tox­ic mater­i­als such as heavy metals, pro­du­cing unwanted by-products and res­ult­ing in major waste and recyc­ling issues. The beauty of enzymes is that these nat­ur­al cata­lysts tar­get only very spe­cif­ic molecules, mean­ing that they pro­duce no or very few by-products. And being nat­ur­al bio-cata­lysts they are of course bio­de­grad­able. Draw­ing on a wide-range of expert­ise in fields includ­ing bio­chem­istry, genet­ics, micro­bi­o­logy, chem­istry and bio­tech­no­logy, the OXY­GREEN pro­ject was able to gen­er­ate unpre­ced­en­ted under­stand­ing of the way in which oxid­at­ive enzymes func­tion at an atom-by-atom level – even pro­du­cing a ​‘movie’ of the cata­lyt­ic pro­cess which can now be viewed on the inter­net (pro­ject web­site). The next object­ive was to explore ways of modi­fy­ing, or engin­eer­ing, those nat­ur­al enzymes which appeared of most interest for their poten­tial applic­ab­il­ity in indus­tri­al pro­cesses. Mak­ing use of the enzyme-modi­fy­ing tech­niques pion­eered by OXY­GREEN, a num­ber of prom­ising res­ults have already been achieved. A mod­i­fied enzyme that can be used in the syn­thes­is of a phar­ma­ceut­ic­al has been iden­ti­fied and is cur­rently being eval­u­ated to see if it is good enough for indus­tri­al use. The same is true of a group of enzymes that can be used in syn­thes­ising a fla­vour com­pound for the food industry. Mean­while, even more pro­gress has been made with a mod­i­fied enzyme for the pro­duc­tion of a vit­am­in, with a pat­ent applic­a­tion now filed. There is no doubt that the engin­eer­ing of new ​‘design­er’ enzymes is a key tech­no­logy in a world where clean­er, cheap­er and safer indus­tri­al pro­cesses are urgently needed. The ground­break­ing work of OXY­GREEN rep­res­ents a giant step for­ward in enabling industry to har­ness the hid­den power of nature to achieve pre­cisely this goal.

Pro­ject details

  • Pro­ject acronym: OXYGREEN
  • Par­ti­cipants: The Neth­er­lands (Coordin­at­or), Ger­many, Aus­tria, Poland, France, Italy 
  • Pro­ject FP7 212281
  • Total costs: €7 527 947
  • EU con­tri­bu­tion: €5 543 249
  • Dur­a­tion: May 2008-April 2013
Source: European Commission
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