Abstract
The World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and AgTech, held recently in Des Moines, Iowa and organized by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), was a very appropriate setting for our community to reflect on the global efforts to drive the synergism between agricultural and industrial biotechnology innovation. The meeting was held in the heartland of American agriculture where there has been much success in developing agriculturally based bioindustries that deliver second-generation biofuels and important chemical building blocks. As reported in this issue by Raj Chinthapalli and his colleagues at the nova-institute (Hurth, Germany), 7.5 million tonnes of biobased building blocks and polymers were produced in 2018. Although this is only 2% of the global production of the petrochemical industry, opportunities exist to expand on this given the continued interest in using renewables and in sustainable manufacturing of these building blocks.
Agriculture has always been the at the core of our industrial biotechnology innovation mission to produced green energy, building blocks, and polymers. As the former Secretary of Agriculture and this year's George Washington Carver Award winner, Tom Vilsack, noted in his IB interview in this issue, our mission has been “to convert everything that we grow into everything we need.” This theme is also echoed by Mario Pennisi, Biostate Pty Ltd (Brisbane, Australia) and this year's recipient of BIO's Leadership and Legacy Award. He states that “with the amount of biomass that we had [in Queensland, Australia], we knew that we could become a leader in industrial biotechnology.” Thus, robust and sustainable agricultural production systems are essential to our mission.
However, we should not lose sight that agricultural is the most quintessential biobased industry! Its success hinges on the careful manipulation and transformation of sunlight, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and water by a diverse array of biomolecular machines to yield the biomass so essential for driving the circular bioeconomy. Biomass demand for food, clothing, energy, and chemical building blocks is expected to increase along with the growing global population. Meeting these demands will be challenging given global competition for land, water, essential nutrients, energy, and capital. In addition, agriculture will be expected to carry its share of the responsibility for conserving and maintaining fresh water supplies, sequestering carbon, providing stewardship of land, and minimizing environmental pollution. This is a tall order, but our community has helped our agricultural colleagues meet this challenge by driving the synergism between agricultural and industrial biotechnology innovation.
Synergism, the interaction or cooperation between two or more systems so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, is at the core our engineering effort to build a circular bioeconomy. As Christophe Schilling, Genomatica (San Diego, CA) reminds us in his Commentary, there is the expectation that “biobased processes that use renewable feedstocks can deliver considerably better lifecycle analyses than conventional processes using fossil-derived feedstocks.” What our community has observed over the past two decades is that this lifecycle performance expectation is not just because the biomass is regenerative, but also because of the expectation that our feedstock delivery system is meeting the responsibilities mentioned earlier. It also hinges on how effective we are in recycling by-products from our manufacturing and consumers systems back into agriculture. This theme is also addressed in Schilling's Commentary.
Our community has an essential role in developing biotechnology solutions to address the demands placed on our food, feedstock, energy, and bioproducts systems and for finding ways to make these systems interact synergistically. We understand that the challenge is one of manipulating complex systems of biotic and abiotic interactions, and we address this challenge by “making biology easier to engineer.” This is a theme that is driven home in our interview with Reshma Shetty, Ph.D., Co-founder, Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc., (Boston, MA) and this year's Rosalind Franklin Award winner. We also hear excitement in these award winners' voices about the potential impact of synthetic biology, gene editing, big data, AI and other advanced technologies for driving industrial biotechnology innovation with an eye to leverage synergistic interactions in our food, feedstock, energy and bioproducts systems. Like former Agricultural Secretary Vilsack, we should all feel “proud to see [our] industry emerge, grow, expand and become more and more relevant!”