Technologies and Facilities

Microbiology, molecular biology, microscopy, and analytical facilities

The team is based within the CSIRO Black Mountain Synergy building and part of a world-leading National Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Precinct. Within the building are start of the art PC2 laboratories for microbiology, molecular biology, microscopy, tissue culture, and analytical chemistry, and fast access to CSIRO’s high performance computing facilities. Just across the road are non-PC2 laboratories and both PC2 and non-PC2 controlled environment plant growth cabinets and greenhouses.

Controlled environment and Field evaluation

Based at the CSIRO Black Mountain site, members of the team have access to world class plant growth facilities and are within 100km of the Boorowa Agricultural Research Station (BARS), a purpose built 290 hectare facility for farming systems research.

Scale up and deployment of biologicals

The team: Louise Thatcher, Lygie Esquirol, Vincent Nowak, Marta Gallart

The challenge

As the pharmaceuticals industry has matured it has overcome many challenges in the scale-up of bioproduction through strain domestication or precision fermentation and the transfer of metabolic pathways into model microbial strains. Comparatively, the biologicals industry is in its infancy and faces a broader range of challenges for scale-up and in-field deployment. These include a need for low-cost production fit for agriculture applications, and challenges associated with the bioproduction of non-model microbial strains, product formulation, stability and shelf-life.

As non-model microbes, biologicals may have complex life cycles and metabolism that requires multidisciplinary approaches and strain-specific optimisation, slower reproduction rates that prolong fermentation processes, and they require finding suitable and inexpensive feedstocks that facilitate bioproduction at high-scale volumes required for agriculture applications.

Our response

Our team addresses the challenges of upstream and downstream processing of biologicals and their field deployment through a series of complimentary and overlapping approaches coupled with collaborations with other CSIRO Research Units and Future Science Platforms.

At a microbial level, the team develops new methods suited to the improvement of strains, their metabolic engineering, and their bioproduction. This includes reducing fermentation times and cost of goods, increasing biomass or metabolic output, and developing unencumbered chassis strains. Methods are ground-truthed on our Actinobacteria collection.

We work closely with the Innovative Bioproduction Platform of the Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform to engineer and evaluate novel production systems, processes, and equipment designs to increase the efficiencies in biological production and scale-up. We have in-house capability to grow microbes from shaker flasks through to 250 mL, 2 L and 10 L bioreactors; suitable for process characterization and optimization. This includes a Sartorius Ambr® 250 Modular System for scale-up and process transfer. Downstream processing through harvesting and product recovery or concentration is also conducted in-house or through our CSIRO research programs in Melbourne.

Impact

Our research aims to resolve some of the current impediments to commercial-scale uptake of biologicals in crop protection. This includes evaluation of novel organisms for improved productivity and unencumbered production of target outputs, and microbial engineering strategies that deliver enhanced productivity and utility. We deploy our capability in partnerships with industry to addresses challenges in the upscaling of production of biological products, with the goal of increasing the adoption of biologicals in current and future farming systems.