Cellobiose, the simplest cellodextrin, is one of CARBAFIN’s target products, derived from sugar (glucose) molecules. The biocatalytic production process is divided into two steps:
- Enzyme No. 1 (sucrose phosphorylase) produces an activated glucose component from sucrose, namely glucose-1-phosphate.
- Enzyme No. 2 (cellobiose phosphorylase) uses the glucose-1-phosphate from the prior reaction and glucose for producing cellobiose.
For a cascade reaction like this, a combined process within one cell would be beneficial. But convincing the cell to do so, comes along with a huge effort of research. The CARBAFIN team was successful in designing an appropriate tool (plasmid) that allows the co-production of the two enzymes in perfect relation to each other. The obtained process and derived knowledge can be easily transferred to other cascadic reactions like this and, therefore, is of broad interest across the whole field of biocatalysis.