Professor Stephen Wallace is the recipient of a €2M European grant for a project that will help to accelerate the transition towards the environmentally-friendly production of chemicals. Stephen, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Professor of Chemical Biotechnology, is one of 328 researchers to have been awarded one of the European Research Council's (ERC) 2024 Consolidator Grants.These grants, totalling €678 million, support outstanding scientists as they build their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas. Stephen’s project ‘MICROCHEMIST’ will combine chemical and biological tools to convert waste including plastic, and renewable materials, such as sugar and CO2, into valuable chemicals.Many high-value chemicals - including fuels, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fragrances, and food flavourings - are currently manufactured from fossil fuels.Relying on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels to produce chemicals by traditional synthetic processes requires lots of energy and generates high carbon emissions which contribute to climate change. Professor Stephen Wallace The chemical industry is the third largest sector for CO2 emissions and global consumption of raw materials and chemicals is set to double by 2060.Diverting existing chemical manufacturing methods away from fossil fuels will help to cut CO2 emissions – mitigating global climate change and accelerating the transition towards net zero.Using waste and other renewable materials, as an alternative to fossil fuels, is also more sustainable and will allow the chemical industry to meet rising global demand. Multidisciplinary Approach Stephen’s team are finding more sustainable ways of producing chemicals by equipping living bacteria with the ability to perform new chemical reactions.By reprogramming living cells with new and useful functions researchers can, for example, turn bacteria into environmentally-friendly living factories to produce chemicals via fermentation.Research from Stephen’s lab has already produced vanilla flavouring from plastic waste and the production of nylon precursors from paper waste.This approach is part of the rapidly advancing field of engineering biology, which applies engineering principles to biology.Uniquely, Stephen’s lab combines this with traditional chemistry techniques to produce chemicals that cannot be made via engineering biology alone and would otherwise remain reliant on fossil fuels.The two fields have existed as largely separate scientific disciplines - using tools and systems that most researchers view as fundamentally incompatible with each other.Over the past eight years Stephen’s team have broken the boundaries at the interface between these two fields, becoming leaders in the emerging field of biocompatible chemistry.Currently it has been estimated that only 30-40% of societal needs for chemicals can be feasibly met using engineering biology – which is limited to reactions that have evolved in nature.Stephen’s unique, multidisciplinary approach will further explore how to combine both techniques to bridge this gap - allowing the sustainable production of a wider range of new chemicals. About European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research.ERC Consolidator Grants support scientific projects spanning all disciplines of research from engineering to life sciences to humanities, and are funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. Metabolic engineering and chemical synthesis have existed as largely independent scientific disciplines for over a century, using tools and systems that have been viewed as fundamentally incompatible. Our recent work has demonstrated this is not the case and in fact chemo-catalysis can be utilised in living microorganisms to create new-to-nature metabolic products. Our ERC CoG aims to uncover, for the first time, the reasons why chemical biocompatibility arises in living organisms, whether it can be rationally engineered, and what industrial applications could result from this new technology. Professor Stephen Wallace UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Professor of Chemical Biotechnology Congratulations to all the researchers who have won ERC Consolidator Grants, in this latest round for the mid-career stage. Whilst we had the funds available to back more applicants this year than in 2023, the fact remains that many applicants who were rated as excellent in this competition will still not be funded due to lack of budget. This waste of talent can only be tackled by increasing the investment in blue-sky research in Europe. Professor Maria Leptin President of the European Research Council Related Links Stephen Wallace LabStephen’s TED talk - How Synthetic Biology Will Help Us Build a Sustainable Future ERC Consolidator Grants This article was published on 2024-12-03
