Final consortium meeting of the ZIM project “F2F” in Münster

On Tuesday afternoon, the partners of the national research and development project “Wertschöpfung aus pilzlichen Fermentationsabfällen durch Herstellung von Feinchemikalien - From Fungal Biomass to Fine Chemicals - F2F” financially supported by the ZIM program (Central Innovation Programme for SMEs) of the BMWi (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) met in Münster to discuss the progress of our work and to plan the final steps towards the imminent end of the project. Our goal had been to develop a bacterial consortium consisting of a substrate converter strain which is able to enzymatically degrade the chitin in fungal cell walls, and a producer strain which converts the degradation products into valuable fine chemicals such as amino acids. The task proved even more difficult than expected, but we were finally able to achieve proof-of-principle for all steps required. However, detailed estimations of the economic feasibility of the process as designed now, using the data we have generated, showed that it would not be sufficiently profitable to reach break-even within an attractive period of time. On the other hand, the data clearly show that alternative uses of the fungal chitin can be enormously profitable, particularly when taking into account the steeply increasing prices for today’s ‘second generation’, high quality chitosans, the demand for which currently exceeds their global availability from shrimp and crab shell wastes.