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Many biotechnology applications tend to be for low production volumes and relatively high-value products such as insulin and vaccines. More difficult to perfect at scale are bioprocesses for high-volume products with lower value, especially if the target product is a reduced chemical such as a solvent or a plastic. Historically, industrial microbiology succeeded under special circumstances when fossil feedstocks were either unavailable or expensive. Inevitably, as these circumstances relaxed, bioprocesses struggled to compete with petrochemistry. Why try to compete? Fossil resources will be phased out in the coming decades in the struggle with climate change. To reach net-zero carbon by 2050 will require all sectors to transition, not only energy and transportation. This may herald a new opportunity for industrial bioprocesses with much better tools.

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The vaccines industry has not changed appreciably in decades regarding technology, and has struggled to remain viable, with large companies withdrawing from production. Meanwhile, there has been no let-up in outbreaks of viral disease, at a time when the biopharmaceuticals industry is discussing downsizing. The distributed manufacturing model aligns well with this, and the advent of synthetic biology promises much in terms of vaccine design. Biofoundries separate design from manufacturing, a hallmark of modern engineering. Once designed in a biofoundry, digital code can be transferred to a small-scale manufacturing facility close to the point of care, rather than physically transferring cold-chain-dependent vaccine. Thus, biofoundries and distributed manufacturing have the potential to open up a new era of biomanufacturing, one based on digital biology and information systems. This seems a better model for tackling future outbreaks and pandemics.

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The transition to a carbon-neutral bioeconomy becomes increasingly urgent in light of climate change. It will require a whole set of policies to stimulate research, investments and public support.

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The bioeconomy concept is proliferating globally. However, the enabling roles of biotechnology may be getting sidelined in the strategies of some countries. A goal for engineering biology is alignment with the engineering design cycle to enable more rapid commercialization. This paper considers several policy options to remove critical technical barriers to commercialization.

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During the Industrial Revolution, it became clear that wood was unsuited as an energy source for industrial production, especially iron smelting. However, the transition to coal was the effort of decades. Similarly, the transition from coal to oil was neither a smooth nor rapid process. The transition to an energy and materials production regime based on renewable resources can similarly be expected to be fraught with many setbacks and obstacles, technically and politically. Those earlier transitions, however, were not complicated by the so-called grand challenges faced today. Above energy security and food and water security lurks climate change. Some events of 2015 have politically legitimised climate change and its mitigation, and 2016 saw the world finally sworn to action. The bioeconomy holds some of the answers to the economic challenges thrown up by mitigating climate change while maintaining growth and societal wellbeing. For bioeconomy policy makers, the future is complex and multi-faceted. The issues start in regions and extend to global reach. It is hard to quantify what is going to be the most difficult of challenges. However, one of the visions for the bioeconomy, that of distributed manufacturing in small- and medium-scale integrated biorefineries flies in the face of the current reality of massive fossil fuel and petrochemical economies of scale, married to gargantuan fossil fuel consumption subsidies.

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Government policies across the world seek to create clusters of companies and other stakeholders that specialise in a particular technology to build an 'industrial ecosystem'. This article looks at some examples of clusters created specifically with industrial biotechnology in mind and examines measures for policymakers.

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After significant delays, the first commercial cellulosic biorefinery is open in Europe and three more are due this year in the USA, with others soon to follow. Although biofuels might be the mainstay, there has been a significant shift in emphasis towards bio-based chemicals. A major bio-based public-private partnership has launched in Europe, but obstacles to biorefining remain, and public policy is not yet directed at enabling the integrated biorefineries of the future.

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Bioremediation differs from other industrial biotechnologies in that, although bioremediation contractors must profit from the activity, the primary driver is regulatory compliance rather than manufacturing profit. It is an attractive technology in the context of a bioeconomy but currently has limitations at the field scale. Ecogenomics techniques may address some of these limitations, but a further challenge would be acceptance of these techniques by regulators.

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The major challenges for humanity include energy security, food security, climate change, and a growing world population. They are all linked together by an instinctive, and yet increasingly complex and evolving concept, that of sustainability. Industrial biotechnology is seen as part of the overall solution, principally to combat climate change and strengthen energy security. At its beating heart is a huge policy challenge - the sustainability of biomass.

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Opinions on what synthetic biology actually is range from a natural extension of genetic engineering to a new manufacturing paradigm. It offers, for the first time in the life sciences, rational design and engineering standardisation. It could address problems across a broad spectrum of human concerns, including energy and food security, and health of growing and aging populations. It also offers great scope for public resistance to its introduction to daily life.

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Recent advances in science and technology are igniting new interest in marine biotechnology. Governments are recognizing the potential of marine biotechnology to provide solutions to grand global challenges of population health, food, and energy security and sustainable industry. This paper examines some of the challenges to and policy options for the development of marine biotechnology.

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Policy issues around biobased chemicals are similar to those for biobased plastics. However, there are significant differences that arise from differences in production volumes and the more specific applications of most chemicals. The drivers for biobased chemicals production are similar to those for biobased plastics, particularly the environmental drivers. However, in Europe, biobased chemical production is further driven by the need to improve the competitiveness of the chemicals industry.

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Any major change to the energy order is certain to provoke both positive and negative societal responses. The current wave of biofuels development ignited controversies that have re-shaped the thinking about their future development. Mistakes were made in the early support for road transport biofuels in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This article examines some of the policies that shaped the early development of biofuels and looks to the future.

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Society is fundamentally ambivalent to the use of plastics. On the one hand, plastics are uniquely flexible materials that have seen them occupy a huge range of functions, from simple packing materials to complex engineering components. On the other hand, their durability has raised concerns about their end-of-life disposal. When that disposal route is landfill, their invulnerability to microbial decomposition, combined with relatively low density and high bulk, means that plastics will occupy increasing amounts of landfill space in a world where available suitable landfill sites is shrinking. The search for biodegradable plastics and their introduction to the marketplace would appear to be a suitable amelioration strategy for such a problem. And yet the uptake of biodegradable plastics has been slow. The term biodegradable itself has entered public controversy, with accidental and intended misuse of the term; the intended misuse has led to accusations and instances of 'greenwashing'. For this and other reasons standards for biodegradability and compostability testing of plastics have been sought. An environmental dilemma with more far-reaching implications is climate change. The need for rapid and deep greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cuts is one of the drivers for the resurgence of industrial biotechnology generally, and the search for bio-based plastics more specifically. Bio-based has come to mean plastics based on renewable resources, but this need not necessarily imply biodegradability. If the primary purpose is GHG emissions savings, then once again plastics durability can be a virtue, if the end-of-life solution can be energy recovery during incineration or recycling. The pattern of production is shifting from the true biodegradable plastics to the bio-based plastics, and that trend is likely to persist into the future. This paper looks at aspects of the science of biodegradable and bio-based plastics from the perspective of policy advisers and makers. It is often said that the bioplastics suffer from a lack of a favourable policy regime when compared to the wide-ranging set of policy instruments that are available on both the supply and demand side of biofuels production. Some possible policy measures are discussed.

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Pine sawdust treated by a series of hydrophobising agents (drying oil, organosilicon emulsion, n-hexadecane and paraffin) was examined as carrier for adsorption immobilisation of hydrocarbon-oxidizing bacterial cells Rhodococcus ruber. It was shown that hydrophobising agents based on drying oil turned out to be optimal (among the other modifiers examined) for the preparation of sawdust carriers suitable for the efficient immobilisation. The results obtained demonstrate promising possibilities in developing a wide range of available and cheap, biodegradable cellulose-containing carriers that possess varying surface hydrophobicity.

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We have previously described the development of a panel of site-specific lux-based bioreporters from an industrial wastewater treatment system remediating coking effluents. The Pseudomonad strains carry a stable chromosomal copy of the luxCDABE operon from Photorhabdus luminescens and display proportional responses in bioluminescence decay with increasing phenol concentration up to 800 mg l-1. In this work we describe their deployment to provide a strategic sensing network for protecting bacterial communities involved in the biological breakdown of coking effluents. This evaluation demonstrated the utility of strategic placement of reporters around heavy industry treatment systems and the reliability of the reporter strains under normal operational conditions. Mono-phenol or total phenolic variation within the treatment system accounted for>65-80% of the luminescence response. The reporters exhibited stable luminescence output during normal operations with maximum standard deviations of luminescence over time of c. 5-15% depending on the treatment compartment. Furthermore, deployment of the bioreporters over a 5-month period allowed the determination of an operational range (OR) for each reporter for effluent samples from each compartment. The OR allowed a convenient measure of toxicity effects between treatment compartments and accurately reflected a specific pollution event occurring within compartments of the treatment system. This work demonstrates the utility of genetic modification to provide ecologically relevant bioreporters, extends the sensing capabilities currently obtained through marine derived biosensors and significantly enhances the potential for in situ deployment of reporting agents.

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Investigations into bacterial responses to vanadium are rare, and in this study were initiated by isolating cultures from crude oil contaminated soil from Russia and Saudi Arabia. Addition of vanadyl sulphate and vanadium pentoxide created acid conditions in the media whilst sodium metavanadate and sodium orthovanadate produced neutral and alkaline effects, respectively. Buffers were introduced for wider comparison of the sample set treatments and to distinguish between the effects of pH and compound toxicity. This study has resulted in the creation of protocols for the pH stabilisation of media containing vanadium compounds and revealed that, although vanadium salts demonstrated some toxic effects, as revealed by MIC and bioluminescence decay tests, the effects were mainly due to pH rather than inherent toxicity of the metal. Capacity for sorption of vanadium to biomass was also investigated.

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