Colorants (pigments and dyes) are used for countless consumer products: from foods to cosmetics, from textiles to coatings. Most colorants are synthetic dyes, prepared from petrochemicals in an unsustainable, environmentally damaging manner. However, colorants are also made in Nature by plants, animals, and microorganisms. This application aims to produce such natural product colorants using microbial systems, and to develop new colorants by creating new biosynthetic routes. Biobased production will yield cheap, safe, and environmentally responsible colorants. The research will also discover how such compounds are synthesized in nature, and what are the rules for their engineered production. Such new knowledge will be widely applicable in many fields, including pharmaceutical science. The project will also train young researchers for careers in biotechnology. The project will be carried out at VTT Research Centre of Finland, in the Otaniemi campus near Helsinki.

2024

2028