Toulouse White Biotechnology
Toulouse White Biotechnology

Overview

Toulouse White Biotechnology (TWB) is a pre-industrial demonstrator which facilitates the interface between companies and academics, offering R&D projects from laboratory research to pilot scale (biocatalysis, synthetic biology, process engineering), in the field of biomaterials, chemicals and biofuels. TWB is an administrative body supported by French National Institute of Agronomy (INRA) with an association agreement National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA Toulouse) and Scientific Research National Center (CNRS). The activities foster the creation and design of biological tools (enzymes, microorganisms, microbial consortia) for use in industrial processes. TWB offers collaborative public / private R&D projects and services. The projects are based on a continuum of expertise: from research and proof of concept to pre-industrial development and industrial technology transfer including business creation. The expertise covers a broad scope of industrial biotechnology: enzyme engineering, synthetic biology… The Microbial strain engineering platform is equipped with two automated colony pickers and specific equipment dedicated to the high-throughput analysis and preparation of nucleic acids, proteins and microorganisms, e.g. capillary electrophoresis systems, spectrofluorometer, custom-made cloning and transformation stations, flow cytometer analyzer/sorter, high capacity transfer liquid systems. The Biotransformation and culture process platform has a whole range of instrumented bioreactors with capacities from 50 mL to 300 L (batch, fed-batch, continuous). These reactors are coupled to an adapted at-line or on-line analytical system characterizing liquid, solid and gas phases. TWB is equipped with a custom-made high-throughput culture station. It consists of a robotic device fully automated and equipped with 24 mini-bioreactors (50mL). The Analytical platform includes chromatographic separation devices (liquid, ion, gas and size exclusion) and conventional and new-generation detectors (UV, infrared,…. TWB delivers a broad scope of services based on its experience in industrial biotechnology: enzyme engineering, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, fermentation, separation and purification processes and analytical techniques.

TWB offers research and development contracts to private companies from research to pilot scale (metabolic pathway design, strain optimization, process optimization and scale-up), in connection with researchers from the top public laboratories.

TWB develops standard and customized service offers: technical and support services on TWB technical platforms, access to equipment, hosting and training.

Technical and support services are (i) High-throughput colony picking, (ii) Plasmid and strain engineering, (iii) Single cell characterization and high throughput screening of microbial cells by cytometry, (iv) Rapid optimization of microbial and enzymatic bioprocess, (v) Scale-up of the microbial culture process, (vi) Amino acid quantitative assay, (vii) Determination of the…. Yes. service.