Dr. John Lucey, director of the Center for Dairy Research (CDR), shared the impressive bioprocessing research, equipment and expertise that is available across the UW-Madison campus during a national webinar hosted last month by BioMade.
BioMADE (Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem), created in October 2020, is one of eight Manufacturing Innovation Institutes sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. It has a network of more than 325 members across 39 states that are developing biomanufacturing technologies with the mission to create a more resilient supply chain, reshore manufacturing jobs, and produce biobased products without relying on foreign sources.
CDR/UW-Madison are members of BioMADE as some of the work that BioMADE supports overlaps with areas of research taking place at CDR and across the UW-Madison campus. Specifically, CDR and other researchers are developing methods to utilize dairy co-products and agricultural residues to make value added materials (i.e., valorization), like green chemicals, biofuels, and natural food ingredients. The webinar helped garner interest in this work and connect with others in the BioMade network. Dr. Lucey also wanted to add that while CDR prefers to use dairy feedstocks, it can also work with other agricultural waste or feedstocks.
CDR and other research groups at UW-Madison are focused on utilizing dairy co-products, which currently have very low value, and use them to produce higher-value products like organic acids, precursors for bio-based plastics, and biobased platform chemicals used to make other higher value materials. These low value dairy co-products include acid whey, which is a byproduct of Greek yogurt production and other dairy products like cottage cheese. Currently, dairy plants are spending money to have these co-products processed by their wastewater treatment plants or dairy plants are using these co-products for low value applications like animal feed. There are also environmental concerns with these co-products as some plants have permission from the state to land spread them on agricultural fields.
Dr. Lucey and other researchers say that there is a better use for these dairy co-products.
“We have to change what we’re doing and change the way we look at these materials not as a waste product, but as organic materials to use for feedstocks to make value added chemicals or ingredients,” Lucey said. “These feedstocks contain a simple sugar and are very consistent. We have lactic acid bacteria that can readily ferment lactose into various high-end products such as natural chemicals and food ingredients.”
CDR is currently engaged with (supporting) other researchers across campus to develop and scale up technologies to ferment dairy co-products into these higher value chemicals. This work is being supported by a new grant program at CDR: Accelerate Biotechnological Innovations in Dairy (ABID). This is a federally funded grant program that is open to academic and industry partners. Dr. Lucey and ABID staff are currently seeking partners to help support and carry out this exciting work of developing technologies to valorize dairy co-products.
Dr. Lucey shared information about CDR and ABID’s collection of assets (e.g., facilities) to help with this work, including downstream and upstream dairy processing equipment and staff expertise and experience. A key part of this work is ABID’s new 400L bioreactor. This piece of equipment, which was recently commissioned, will help bridge the gap between benchtop scale technologies to industrial scale technologies necessary to make this work a reality in the dairy industry. In addition, Dr. Sonali Mohapatra recently joined the ABID program. She will play a vital role in the ABID grant program as the lead in conducting bench-, pilot-, and industrial-scale fermentation trials utilizing the new 400L bioreactor to optimize growth of the microbes (e.g., bacteria or yeast), metabolite production, and process reproducibility.
Several projects are already underway. One project is using dairy co-products to make polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable plastic. Another project has a technology that develops tagatose, a low-calorie sweetener, from various dairy co-products. ABID is also working with another group to produce butanol (biofuels) from dairy co-products. These are just a couple of examples of the type of work that is possible by fermenting or converting dairy co-products into other, more valuable products.
“We have an increasing number of groups and companies that are interested in this work,” Dr. Lucey said. “Our goal is to help speed up commercialization and secure further funding to offset costs as people go through scale up process. We have the capabilities to make this happen.”
Learn more about the ABID grant program at abid.wisc.edu.
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