"By far, nature is the best chemist of all time" according to Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold. McGEA will develop nature inspired strategies to help avert the pending climate catastrophe. We will discover, characterize, engineer and exploit metalloenzymes as potent biocatalysts to efficiently perform chemically challenging reactions of high environmental impact. Specifically, we will use metalloenzymes to tackle three burning issues that fall squarely in the remit of the EU Green Deal action plan: CO2 capture, (bio)hydrogen production, and wastewater monitoring and remediation. These challenges will be addressed using purified metalloenzymes incorporated into hybrid materials and live bacterial cells as self-regenerating catalytic metalloenzyme carriers. Implementation of these two strategies will proceed with research activities across the full pipeline of metalloenzyme development. This will include i) the assembly of the metallic co-factors, as a prerequisite for establishing protocols for efficient metalloenzyme production, ii) rational redesign, directed evolution and in silico strategies to develop enzyme variants that show improved catalytic activity and stability, and iii) the incorporation of the enzymes into matrices that allow for enzyme reusability, stabilization, or their self-assembly into multi-enzymatic nanostructures for substrate channeling. The execution of this program relies on a strong interdisciplinary and intersectoral team. The McGEA brings together 6 research groups from EU and 2 research groups from overseas, all of them internationally recognized for their scientific excellence, and 3 EU companies that will join forces to accelerate the transition to a climate-neutral Europe. The consortium is designed to provide a diverse portfolio of skills through staff secondments to achieve integration from the stages of fundamental scientific discovery to the development of metalloenzyme-based processes and prototype devices.

B-LigZymes is an international, interdisciplinary and intersectorial platform that directly addresses current limitations in lignin degradation by generating technological and economical solutions inspired by fundamental research. B-LigZymes provides a holistic view for the development of biocatalytic processes involved in the valorisation of lignin. The B-LigZymes consortium is composed of 6 academic organizations, 4 of which are located in Europe (Portugal, The Netherlands, Italy and Germany), 1 in the United States and 1 in Argentina; there are 3 non-academic organizations in the partnership located in Spain, Finland and The Netherlands. The B-LigZymes programme foster collaborations across sectors, disciplines and countries and a shared culture of research & innovation (R&I) that welcomes and rewards creativity and entrepreneurship. The existent complementarity among Beneficiary Organizations and partners enables bi-directional international and intersectorial staff exchanges and the sharing of knowledge and ideas from research to market and vice-versa. These activities will be additionally nurtured by wide network training events, such as workshops, where the contribution of members with different expertise will bring a synergistic effect. Overall, the networking activities proposed will allow research members to develop new R&I and transferable skills that will boost future career opportunities, strengthening Europe’s human capital, competitiveness and growth and, contributing for a knowledge-based economy and society, in accordance to the expected objectives and impact of the RISE’s MSCA call.

The purpose of this trans-national training network is to train PhD students, in investigating, building, and producing a new generation of bioinspired implantable sensors of pressure, temperature and acidity. New devices will be made of complex hybrid materials, composed of natural molecules and synthetic biopolymers, with the additional properties of being fully biocompatible and bioresorbable, unlike most of existing implantable sensors; anticipating thus, a new generation of sensors that would not require posterior surgical extraction. BioInspireSensing project will apply the state-of-the-art in ion channel proteins, cell membrane transport, unilamellar vesicles, tethered planar lipid bilayers, synthetic biochemistry, and biodegradable and flexible conducting polymers to obtain the novel sensors. It will take advantage of a unique multi-sectorial and multi-field environment to further teach early stage researchers (ESR) to apply the gained knowledge in analysing and designing/engineering complex biologica

Although they have the potential to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of biorefineries, oxidative enzymes have not experienced a complete breakthrough yet in the biobased industries. This is mainly caused by the high cost and long time associated with traditional enzyme engineering methods such as directed evolution. SMARTBOX will develop an advanced computational engineering platform specifically for oxidative enzymes, which can automatically screen for improved enzyme variants with minimal human intervention. This is achieved by implementing several innovations into current computational screening methods, most importantly machine learning, which allows to train the algorithms with experimental results. As this significantly improves computational predictability, the time and costs associated with oxidative enzyme engineering will be reduced 10-fold compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) directed evolution methods. Relying on the advanced engineering platform, SMARTBOX will develop the one-enzyme conversion of HMF into FDCA and intermediates, and the one-enzyme conversion of lignin monomers into a potential biobased building block for polycarbonates and vanillin. By adopting a 1-enzyme FDCA production process, the associated production costs and carbon footprint are expected to decrease significantly compared to SOTA chemical oxidation methods. The unique feature of SMARTBOX is that reductive catalytic fractionation (RCF) will be used to selectively produce specific lignin monomers from biomass in near theoretical yields. The structural similarity of the resulting monomers with the SMARTBOX building blocks allows the development of high-yielding processes with only one enzyme. Due to the smart combination between oxidative biocatalysis and RCF, the production of bio-aromatics will proceed with higher yields than the state of the art.

ZYMVOL is start-up specialized in computer-driven biocatalyst discovery and development for the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industry. We harness the power of high-performance computing to identify and optimize custom-made biocatalysts that deliver additional value. Biocatalysts are enzymes that accelerate industrial chemical reactions and have multiple applications for the synthesis of chemical compounds. Engineered enzymes can provide improved performance, representing a unique advantage. The protein engineering market is a fast-growing business estimated to reach 2.67B€ by 2024 (CARG +15%). The main obstacle today to performance enhanced biocatalysts is that current enzyme engineering processes rely on slow and costly experimental tests with uncertain outcomes. Our in-silico engineering platform can rapidly find thousands of enzyme variants delivering reliable predictions, that allow to replace up to 90% of experimental tests, making the enzyme development cost (10-fold lower) and time (cut by 50%) effective. ZYMVOL aims to be the reference in the computer-driven enzyme engineering market and convert molecular modelling in a commodity. In addition to our virtual enzyme sales (we plan to capture €11.17M by 2022 after entering into the North American market), we will promote a royalty-based revenue model from licensing enzymes developed in-house (global enzyme market is projected to reach €9B by 2024). ZYMVOL’s founding team is composed by Maria Fátima Lucas, CEO, Emanuele Monza, CSO and Victor Gil, CTO. All members of the team hold a PhD in chemistry, physics and biomedical engineering. The Company is seeing excellent traction which has allowed it to grown organically in its first 20 months. Thanks to a services-based business model it has already reached breakeven in 2018. The Company has quickly landed some high-profile business and developed a respected reputation by pioneering the access to high resolution computational simulations for all industries.