BioFUMAC

Winner of the 2024 call for projects.

Fumaric acid and acrylic acid are two basic chemicals that are still mainly of petroleum origin. The BioFUMAC project aims to develop a new route for the production of bio-based acrylic acid, based on the robust fungal bioproduction of fumaric acid.

On the one hand, based on biotechnology and process engineering, our consortium will work to develop an optimized and industrially relevant bioprocess for fumaric acid production by overcoming biotic and physical limitations.

Three areas of work will be implemented:

• The modelling of industrial-scale bioreactors by coupling flow dynamics and a kinetic model will be studied.
• In parallel, by combining in silico and experimental methods, biodiversity exploration, protein engineering and directed evolution, we will work to obtain an enzyme catalysing the decarboxylation of fumaric acid into acrylic acid.
• Finally, we will design and test a complete acrylic acid bioproduction scheme, implementing an intermediate step of nanofiltration.

The advances made in this project will enable us to propose a new route for the bioproduction of acrylic acid and an improvement in the bioproduction of fumaric acid. The envisaged bioconversion process could also be adapted to other biomolecules of interest derived from fumaric acid.
 

Projet lifetime:
 

2024 - 2028

Scientific manager:
 

Asma Timoumi (INSA Toulouse)