“What you do not understand, ask the living things.”
To realize production activities that can solve social problems, both the uniqueness of the product or the material and production efficiency are important. Most bio-products that changed the world, were given birth using the unique qualities of the features of organisms or their structure skillfully discovered from the biological world by the technical experts. Of course, the start line of development has never been close to the goal. It’s a battle of wits against the magnitude of biodiversity, which is said to be an incomparable number of a trillion just by counting microbes alone. The important thing is to make a good decision within a limited budget and a limited number of trials. Based on the know-how of experienced technical experts, we will be able to approach microbes with higher potential by continuously learning through analyzing response data.
Japan
Kyoto University, National Institute of Technology and Evaluation (NITE)
I believe that the dream of microbial engineers is to discover microorganisms with unknown abilities and create new values using the abilities discovered. I was one of them and finally I joined the project to search for microorganisms (enzymes/genes). In addition to old-fashioned techniques such as enrichment culture and strain library, we can use genetic engineering methods which are now common, and there is no limitation on what we use for the exploratory research. The basic spirit is "to ask living organisms about what we do not know". Of course, it is important to think, but it is also very important to ask living organisms first before theorizing everything. This sometimes leads to the discovery of microorganisms’ functions beyond the original assumption, which is the greatest attractiveness of exploratory research. Fortunately, we are collaborating with Laboratory of Fermentation Physiology and Applied Microbiology in Kyoto University, which has one of the world's finest achievements in exploratory research, and I am learning the technologies. I believe that with these technologies, we can help chemical companies that want to experiment with the power of biotechnology and biotech companies that want to utilize outside resources since they have exhausted consideration within the company. Let's make a new history of industrial biotechnology together.
