Our platform to leverage nature's ingenuity
Transforming hazardous, toxic chemical manufacturing through harnessing millions of years of microbial evolution
Specialised metabolism, a distinct form of metabolism in microorganisms that extends beyond basic cellular functions like energy production and growth, focuses on producing unique, complex compounds that help microbes thrive in competitive environments like the complex soil ecosystem. The biocatalysts that help Nature produce these small molecules have evolved over millions of years to perform challenging chemistry in highly-efficient ways, and harnessing these can help us to transform chemical synthesis on an industrial scale. Nature already plays a crucial role in biotechnology and drug and agrochemical discovery, with advances like genome sequencing, directed evolution, and AI driving the creation of high-value products. However, where other approaches attempt to reprogramme Nature, at ErebaGen our proprietary platform enables us to find the pre-evolved solutions through our extensive knowledge of microbial metabolism.
Genome sequencing has uncovered vast numbers of undiscovered biosynthetic pathways, which act as a route to new biocatalysts and small molecules. A major challenge remains: efficiently accessing these new products of specialised metabolism. In lab conditions, only about 10% of bacterial specialised metabolism is active, with most remaining silent. ErebaGen’s technologies overcome this by using a proprietary activator to unlock these silent pathways, enabling the discovery of new biocatalysts and chemicals for various industries.
With its diverse and flexible repertoire of biocatalysts, specialised metabolism produces compounds widely used in medicine, agrochemicals, and cosmetics. The biochemical pathways and individual biocatalysts that build these molecules also offer sustainable, low-cost alternatives to traditional chemical synthesis. Built on over 25 years of research, our platform integrates bioinformatics, automation, strain engineering, and synthetic chemistry, powering our engineering platform that has three key products—Scout, Forge, and Mine—each designed to harness the potential of these newly accessible metabolic pathways.
