By Eduardo Couto – Director of the Brazilian
Biorenewables National Laboratory LNBR

Economic and population growth combined with the urbanization trend will lead to growing demand for energy and industrialized products. Nowadays, major industrial transformation routes use fossil feedstocks as raw materials, but we need renewable and sustainable solutions to produce molecules that replicate oil derivatives. Additionally, expectations that consumption of industrial products such as plastics will increase demand alternatives to deal with waste from these materials. Biotechnology can create opportunities for new organic-based industrial production models with less environmental impact, rational use of natural resources, and which stimulate implementation of a circular economy, promoting low-carbon technologies and new patterns of behavior.

At the international level, around a decade ago the United Nations Program for Industrial Development and the Organization for Economic Development Cooperation began to publish reports on the role of biotechnology. In 2017, the US National Academy of Sciences was already indicating trends like the industrialization of biology. With the discovery of CRISPR-Cas as a molecular tool for gene editing, the possibilities for R&D expanded significantly, and the World Economic Forum recognized the importance of this topic in 2021, when it established the Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology. The European Community and more recently the United States have been supporting initiatives to promote the production of bioproducts and organize the innovation ecosystem around this topic.

Brazil can play a leading role in this new global model for industrial production and consumption and for addressing agri-environmental problems such as replacing agricultural chemicals. This requires more profound scientific knowledge and the capacity to transform it into biotechnologies that add value to Brazil’s comparative advantages, such as our rich biodiversity and abundant biomass, which is also diverse and economically competitive.

Our great challenge in R&D lies in constructing cellular systems that act as biofactories to produce molecules that are useful to industry. The scale of the problem becomes clear when we understand that nature has taken billions of years to evolve and improve such microorganisms, and we intend to emulate this process by creating environmentally-sound biotech solutions for industrial production and consumption in a short period of time. This implies obtaining complete and accurate genomes from microbial communities, discovering new enzymes and biological functions, and designing biological systems with various biocatalysts that synthesize increasingly complex molecules.

At CNPEM we have the cutting-edge skills and infrastructure to integrate state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering and cast light on the mechanisms of biocatalysis at the atomic and molecular levels, using synchrotron light sources, electron microscopy, and computational simulations including quantum mechanics. But this is just the beginning of the journey; microorganisms of industrial relevance are part of bioprocesses. Their interactions with the extracellular environment are complex and not always predictable, a challenge that expands as the scale increases. Validating biotechnologies on various scales depends on profound knowledge of cell metabolism and behavior, as well as the ability to monitor and control these systems in real time.

I conclude with a reflection: what else are we lacking to quantify and value our natural capital and accelerate the transition to a sustainable economic development model that will bring wealth, jobs, and prosperity to Brazil?