BASF invests in biotech start-up Bota Bio for living cells and enzymes tech to make products

In Germany, BASF Venture Capital invested in Bota Biosciences, Ltd., an industrial synthetic biotech company based in China that is developing a proprietary next-generation biotechnology platform which enables sustainable and economical production of high value products for a broad array of industrial applications such as sweeteners, vitamins, personal care or crop protection products.

Industrial biotechnology or “white biotechnology”, uses living cells and enzymes to develop and manufacture products efficiently. Also, it can upgrade cells, enzymes and processes easily and therefore has the flexibility to adjust its capacity and volume to meet the market demands. Moreover, it expands market opportunities for products not accessible using conventional manufacturing processes. Computation is the core and foundation of Bota Bio’s next-generation bio-foundry to build and evolve enzyme, strain and process pipelines. It quickly identifies and characterizes suitable microbial hosts, shuffles and combines desired phenotypes to create new industrial strains, and furthermore develops and improves manufacturing processes starting from green raw materials, such as sugar.

Bota Bio’s innovative fermentation process is scalable making commercial production possible.

BASF itself uses fermentation and biocatalysis to manufacture products such as vitamins and enzymes and is working on processes that use white biotechnology for the production of chemical building blocks from renewable raw materials such as sugar and plant oils. The two strong partners are looking forward to explore possible synergies.