Lesaffre Partners with Recombia Biosciences to Advance Gene Editing

Recombia and Lesaffre announced they will be joining forces in the area of yeast strain development through a strategic partnership. Recombia Biosciences aims to harness its proprietary genome editing technologies to accelerate the development of yeast for sustainable production of fermented ingredients.

The ability to generate thousands of yeast strains in parallel, combined with laboratory automation, is expected to exponentially accelerate development of projects in the areas of health, the environment, and energy. The partnership also signifies Lesaffre’s entry into the world of Synthetic Biology, considered to be the major biotechnological opportunity of this decade.

“This kind of partnership exemplifies an innovative way that industry can support and foster progress in Biotechnology. Through collaboration with scientists and entrepreneurs, we will be able to find new solutions, which will be beneficial for the future, especially in health or in environment protection”, says Antoine Baule, CEO of Lesaffre.

Recombia’s technologies are based upon techniques that increase the efficiency of genome editing and enable engineering of yeast at very high throughput. The strategic collaboration with Lesaffre aims to advance Recombia’s proprietary gene-editing technologies to identify new yeast strains, discover novel yeast physiology of industrial relevance and optimize the production of biosourced ingredients and biofuels.

“We are excited to be working with Lesaffre on moving our gene-editing programs forward,” says Dr. Justin Smith, CEO of Recombia. “We see tremendous potential to leverage our expertise in genome editing and synthetic biology to develop new and innovative fermentation solutions and products.”