Innovations
A new platform for sustainable biomanufacturing
CarboNcare develops a growth-coupled bioproduction platform for the conversion of CO2-derived methanol into high-value chemical intermediates.
This page summarises the scientific and technological innovations at the heart of the project — and what sets them apart from existing approaches.
Why bioproduction from methanol is hard
Methanol is a promising C1 feedstock: it can be produced renewably from CO2 and electricity, is liquid at ambient conditions, energy-dense, and does not compete with food production. Its highly reduced state allows many bioconversions without CO2 release.
However, methanol oxidation is thermodynamic challenging, and even when bacteria can be engineered to grow on methanol, industrial bioprocesses face a persistent challenge: genetic drift.
Over time, natural selection within the bioreactor favours non-producing mutants, which gradually overtake the culture and force costly process restarts.
Respiro-fermentation: Enabling methanol-based bioproduction
CarboNcare’s platform operates under aerobic conditions. By integrating respiratory modules into the bacterial chassis, the team creates the thermodynamic driving force necessary to ferment methanol efficiently.
This approach combines the carbon efficiency associated with fermentation with the robustness of aerobic bioprocesses, expanding the range of feedstocks that can be converted into valuable products enables unbalanced fermentations and largely expands the range of feasible carbon-product combinations of fermentation.
CarboNcare builds on two established industrial workhorses: E. coli and P. putida. By enabling these bacteria to use methanol, the project combines existing biotechnology know-how with the opportunities offered by renewable carbon.
Growth-coupled bioproduction: Solving the stability problem
Growth-coupled bioproduction (GCBP) is the project’s core metabolic engineering strategy. It introduces an obligatory dependency between bacterial growth and production of the target molecule: the bacteria can only grow when they produce the desired chemical.
High stoichiometric yield
Product formation becomes an intrinsic requirement for growth, not incidental to it.
Genetic stability
Because non-producing mutants cannot grow, they cannot take over the culture. The production strain remains dominant over long fermentation periods.
Continuous operation
The stability conferred by GCBP makes long-duration, continuous bioproduction feasible — eliminating the need for costly batch restarts.
Process robustness and predictability
Critical for industrial scale-up and investor confidence.
Continuous manufacturing towards industrial deployment
CarbonCare is designed for long-term continuous operation, enabled by the stability of growth-coupled production strains.
Continuous cultivation has the potential to increase productivity, reduce downtime, and improve resource efficiency compared with traditional batch processes.
Industrial scalability is not an afterthought: the project includes systematic bioprocess design, techno-economic analysis, and life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the platform’s environmental and commercial viability at scale. The goal is not just proof-of-concept, but a pathway to industrially deployable technology.