[Speaker is John Frost, co-founder and chief science officer of Draths Corp.]
Frost: This company is a combination of molecular biology, genetic engineering and synthetic chemistry and catalysis. Our technology is based on taking sugar, genetically engineering the microbe, optimizing the fermentation conditions to obtain high yield conversion of carbohydrate into the intermediate. That cloudiness started as a clear solution, that’s bacteria as it grows. There’s not much in here. This is just a little bit of salts and sugar and these things are growing. This is going from the single colony of the flask to the evaluation at two-liter scale. We’re adding sugar into this, that’s the carbon source, and that’s the expense, so we want a good yield of sugar to our product. We’ll get about a half a kilo of product out of this fermenter, and it’s that half a kilo that then goes to the organic chemists, and the organic chemists start working with that to convert that into other product. This is a kind of a platform approach, it’s like a tree. You have the trunk of the tree, and then you have the branches of the tree. This is the trunk of the tree, and what comes out of this is a product that chemically be converted to a number of different products. That’s actually how the chemical industry has historically worked with the trunk of the tree was petroleum. What has changed is the trunk of our tree is renewable. For the first time, they can make their carpet from renewable material and every carbon atom in that carpet fiber is renewable. We provide the renewable capability. In terms of something that’s made from aromatic chemicals, from benzene, there’s nothing in our space. This is basically the emergence of what will be the chemical industry from the 21st century on to whatever happens.
[Produced by G.L. Kohuth. Media Communications. University Relations. Michigan State University]