Posted October 21, 2009, at 1:39 p.m. CST

Verdezyne Inc., a privately-held synthetic biology company developing fermentation processes for industrial chemicals and biofuels, announced that it has been awarded a $1.7 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy And Infectious Diseases for a period of 1.5 years. The goal of this program is to quickly and reliably advance the construction of directed mutant gene libraries widely considered important technology tools for synthetic biology.

Verdezyne will apply their proprietary computational and bioinformatics programs to create highly diverse gene libraries to further enhance metabolic engineering tools. This enhanced capability will be directly useful to life science researchers, and serve as a platform for protein and metabolic engineering.

"This grant will fund research to progress the role of bioinformatics in synthetic biology," said Stephen Picataggio, chief scientific officer, Verdezyne. "By advancing this technology, we will be able to utilize the computational tools for improved protein expression and function for our internal biofuel and biobased chemical programs."

The project described was supported by STTR program with Award Number 2R42A1066758 from the National Institute of Allergy And Infectious Diseases. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Allergy And Infectious Diseases or the National Institutes of Health.

SOURCE: VERDEZYNE INC.