Bacteriocin-Based Contamination Control

Protecting bioprocesses from microbial contamination

Bacteriocin-based contamination control offers a targeted approach to a recurring challenge across industrial bioprocessing. Unwanted microorganisms can compete with production strains for nutrients, generate inhibitory metabolites, disrupt fermentation performance and ultimately reduce process productivity.

The challenge is particularly important in large-scale processes, where even relatively small losses in performance can have a significant economic impact.

Conventional contamination-control strategies may rely on antibiotics, chemical antimicrobials or stringent process interventions. These approaches can be poorly selective, may interfere with the production organism and increasingly face sustainability and antimicrobial-resistance concerns.

Syngulon’s precision contamination-control solution

Syngulon develops bacteriocin-based technologies designed to selectively control unwanted microorganisms in industrial bioprocesses.

Bacteriocins are naturally occurring antimicrobial peptides with defined spectra of activity. By selecting bacteriocins active against the relevant contaminants, contamination-control strategies can be tailored to a particular production process while minimizing impact on the desired production organism.

Syngulon’s approach can be implemented either by direct addition of bacteriocins or by engineering production organisms to produce bacteriocins directly within the process.

Key benefits

Targeted antimicrobial action
Bacteriocins can be selected according to the microorganisms responsible for contamination, enabling more targeted control than broad-spectrum antimicrobial approaches.

Protection of process performance
Controlling contaminating microorganisms helps limit substrate competition, unwanted metabolites and other factors that can negatively affect fermentation performance.

Flexible implementation
Bacteriocins can be supplied directly to a process or produced in situ by engineered microorganisms, depending on the production platform and application.

Adaptable to specific contaminants
Different bacteriocins and bacteriocin combinations can be screened to identify activity against the microbial contaminants associated with a particular industrial process.

Reduced reliance on conventional antibiotics
Bacteriocin-based strategies provide an alternative approach for processes seeking to reduce or avoid the use of traditional antibiotics for contamination management.

Applications in Industrial Fermentation and Bioprocessing

Syngulon’s contamination-control technology can be applied to microbial production processes in which unwanted microorganisms may compromise performance, including:

• industrial fermentation;
• enzyme and recombinant protein production;
• biofuels and biochemicals;
• food and feed biotechnology;
• animal-health production processes;
• other microbial biomanufacturing applications.

A flexible platform for precision contamination control

Syngulon combines bacteriocin screening, synthetic biology and strain engineering to develop contamination-control strategies adapted to specific microorganisms and production environments.

Our PARAGEN collection of natural and synthetic bacteriocins provides a broad resource for identifying bacteriocins or bacteriocin combinations active against industrial contaminants.

The objective is not simply to apply a broad antimicrobial treatment, but to develop precision contamination-control solutions adapted to the production process, contaminant and host organism.

Syngulon’s bacteriocin-based contamination control platform can be adapted to different industrial microorganisms and production environments.

Our technology is available to industrial partners through licensing.

Learn more in the presentation below