The Onyx is the ultimate platform for engineering microbial strains for small molecule production.
Engineering microbial strains to serve as biomolecular factories faces a number of critical challenges including low expression, enzyme degradation, misfolding, secretion issues, and inactivity. Onyx overcomes these obstacles by combining rational engineering and genome exploration to target both known pathways and also cast a genome-wide net to identify new ways to improve production. In a matter of months you will be able to identify beneficial mutations in known and unknown targets and quickly improve the production of your molecule of interest.
Microbial expression systems often use plasmids as vectors for the initial production of recombinant molecules. However, these beneficial changes often fail to perform once the molecular pathway is transferred into the production strain for manufacturing scale-up.
Onyx engineers changes directly in the genome of the production strain, avoiding the need to re-introduce the gene from a plasmid to the genome.
Molecules produced in yeast or bacteria can exhibit toxic properties and reduce the cell viability of the microbe and result in low production titers. Improving tolerance to the component produced is an effective way to overcome the toxicity and increase production. The Onyx technology offers you the ability to quickly identify genes and mutations that improve tolerance. Build large Onyx engineered cell library and leverage the Onyx Barcode to rapidly characterize selected pools to identify edits conferring tolerance.
Check out the short video to the left to see how Ginkgo Bioworks used this strategy to identity AcrB edits in native context.
Read our application notes on small molecule production or contact us to speak with one of our Genome Engineering Experts.
The Onyx gives you the flexibility and scalability to develop virtually limitless libraries. Create insertions, deletions, substitutions, or full saturation mutagenesis, in a single gene, a pathway, or the whole genome.