A team of researchers at the Instituto de Automática e Informática Industrial (Instituto ai2-UPV) has developed DetSpace, the first web platform that provides a complete map of possible routes to design biological production and biosensing circuits, that is, the key to bio-based products relevant to the bioeconomy, such as drugs, nutritional products or compounds for the diagnosis of diseases. The website has been developed within the framework of BIOECODBTL (Biodesign for the bioeconomy: efficient biomanufacturing through the Design-Build-Test-Learn Cycle), a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Based on an comprehensive database of biological compounds with industrial interest and algorithms developed with artificial intelligence, the tool determines the main biodetection pathways for both natural and genetically modified production routes. The map contains a total of 532 producible compounds connected through biological reactions to 454 detectable molecules. Thus, DetSpace will allow synthetic biologists to easily design biosensing routes for the dynamic regulation of metabolic circuits and save time and costs in biofoundries or cell factories.
Pablo Carbonell, principal researcher of the project, explains that “based on the DetSpace tool, the BIOECODBTL project aims to offer a digital twin environment that allows the complete virtualization of the biomanufacturing process, including the stages of design, development, implementation, test and optimization of producer strains, combining producible and detectable routes in a dynamic regulation system. This environment should allow cell factories or biofoundries, in the future, to improve the planning and optimization of resources for biotechnology and biomanufacturing processes.”
The development of DetSpace has been recently published by the scientific journal “Nucleic Acids Research.
“One of the most remarkable contributions of the BIOECODBTL project is to tackle climate change by providing tools that promote the industry’s transition towards industrial processes based on biological products instead of chemicals compounds.” In this sense, BIOECODTBL has worked with the biological products with the greatest potential to contribute to the ecological transition, which affects energy generation processes from biomass, conversion of CO2 into renewable chemicals and the production of construction materials, cosmetics, nutritional products and drugs with a biological and non-chemical base.
Together with Pablo Carbonell, the researchers Hèctor Martín Lázaro and Ricardo Marín Bautista have also participated in this project.