Lesaffre’s capabilities in fermentation applied to the BioImpulse project

by Anne-laure Sallanon | 10 September 2020

Leaf, a business unit of Lesaffre, a key global player in the field of yeast and fermentation, is innovating in the field of green chemistry by developing fermentation solutions to reduce the industrial manufacturers’ dependence on fossil oil. Lesaffre’s participation in BioImpulse project reflects its commitment to this transformation.

As part of the project, Lesaffre team brings its expertise in fermentation to test the strain robustness, optimize the culture medium, and design and scale up the monomer production process. This biobased monomer is a fundamental component of the new adhesive resin the project aims to develop.

A multidisciplinary team

The project involves 15 people with a wide range of skills:

  • In the laboratory, Lesaffre’s fermentation department is conducting the experiments to identify the optimal conditions to produce the monomer by the microorganism. In order to test a maximum number of parameters, technicians and engineers are using high-throughput fermentation systems coupled with the methodology of design of experiments. Thanks to the Ambr® technology, they carry out up to 24 fermentations per week. In addition to saving a lot of time, this scale-down technology provides very reliable results while minimizing the amount of media used since the fermentations are carried out in automated 250 mL bioreactors.
    The 7 scientists also run larger scale productions, in 7 to 300 L fermenters. Then a technician/engineer from Lesaffre Industrial Pilot separates the resulting biomass from the culture medium which contains the molecule of interest. After a step at the analytical department, BioImpulse partners receives the culture medium for the purification stage.

  •  In the offices, Lesaffre team take care of project administration (project management, financial control, legal) and, Leaf support functions, work with the partners to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and communicate on the BioImpulse project.