Synthetic biology is the result of a high degree of integration of multiple disciplines
Synthetic biology gathers and integrates many disciplines such as life science, engineering and information science. It has broad application prospects in many fields such as natural product synthesis, chemical industry, bioenergy, biomedicine and so on. The industrialization of production products by means of synthetic biology mainly includes five important links: strain transformation, metabolic regulation, separation and purification, polymerization process and application development. Synthetic biology can realize the quantitative control of products, and its core lies in the precise regulation of strain transformation process and synthetic pathway by using genetic engineering.
Many factors have promoted the rapid development of synthetic biology, and the industry has entered the landing period of application transformation
The accumulation of basic research, breakthroughs in key enabling technologies and new and high financing rate of the industry jointly promote the synthetic biology industry to enter the market entry period. The global synthetic biology company can be divided into basic layer and application layer. The basic layer company grasps the technology of object design and automation platform, DNA and RNA synthesis or software design. The core of the application layer company is to apply synthetic biology technology to the development and marketization of products such as medical care, industrial chemicals and biofuels. China’s synthetic biology industry is in an early stage. Production enterprises are distributed in the basic layer and application layer, mostly concentrated in the basic layer, and some technologies have global leading advantages.
Synthetic biology has production advantages in green chemical manufacturing
60% of the material inputs in the global economy can be produced by biological means. Different from the traditional microbial fermentation production mode, the green manufacturing of chemicals is to re synthesize a new artificial biological system to maximize the conversion of raw materials into products at a high rate. Synthetic biology has three production advantages in the field of chemical manufacturing: (1) the synthetic biological manufacturing route is milder, more energy-saving and low-carbon than the traditional petrochemical route; (2) Some biological products have significant cost advantages; (3) some synthetic biological manufacturing has advanced technology and has more advantages in product quality.
The barrier of synthetic biology industrialization mainly lies in solving the problem of realizing large-scale production technology
For enterprises that synthesize products by biological method, the process from laboratory scientific research results to product commercialization focuses on the realization of large-scale production process, and whether the large-scale production process can be realized mainly depends on the transformation efficiency of front-end bacteria and the amplification effect of back-end process. (1) The design of high-performance strains and the optimal synthesis pathway will improve the conversion rate, production efficiency and yield scale of synthetic biological products; (2) The research and development of efficient and low-cost separation and purification technology can not only realize the important link of product industrialization, but also an important technical bottleneck to determine the large-scale industrialization practice of biological manufacturing. (3) Choosing a product with long-term market space and value is also very important for enterprises engaged in the industrialization of synthetic biological manufacturing.
The application of synthetic biology in chemical industry will usher in a broad space for development
According to the statistics of CB insights and Biospace, in 2020, the global synthetic biology market scale will be US $6.1 billion, and the industry CAGR will be 16.15% from 2017 to 2020. CB insights predicts that the industry scale is expected to increase to US $18.9 billion by 2024; From the perspective of downstream application market structure, medical health and industrial chemicals are the two most important application fields of synthetic biology. At present, many chemical enterprises have realized the production of chemicals and fuels by biological manufacturing. Chemical manufacturing and bioenergy product development based on synthetic biology will help to break the resource and environmental bottleneck of economic development and build a new green industrialization road of sustainable development. In the next 10-20 years, synthetic biology will have a great impact on the traditional industrial production mode by improving the existing fermentation process, developing new biological pathways for the production of existing materials and chemicals, and producing new materials and chemicals.
Key companies: focus on recommending the global leading enterprise of biosynthetic small variety amino acids with platform effect Anhui Huaheng Biotechnology Co.Ltd(688639) ; It is suggested to pay attention to the global leading enterprise Cathay Biotech Inc(688065) .
Risk warning: changes in the time and intensity of policy implementation; Biosafety risks; Risk of disclosure of core technology; Technology breakthrough bottleneck and downstream application and promotion risk
