Digitalisation in bioeconomy

In essence, the bioeconomy is about using renewable feedstocks to produce everyday goods and services. The bioeconomy is not just concerned with biotechnology. It is now seen as a new means of production that will gradually replace fossil-based production and be consistent with the concept of a circular economy. The whole bioeconomy business cycle is ripe for digitalisation. This includes extraction and procurement of materials, as well as logistics and distribution of intermediate goods. It also comprises the retail of final products to consumers, including, as envisioned in a circular economy, the reuse, repair and recycling of products and materials.

The great convergence

Digitalisation and biotechnology can work together. Together, they can provide solutions to major bioeconomy policy goals that could not be tackled by either alone.
The combination of digital and biological transformation may greatly change the design and handling of production processes and their products. Convergence is becoming a necessity for business survival.

An integrated technology platform could unlock the potential

Integrating engineering design with biotechnology could unlock commercial potential, especially when combined with digitalisation and automation.The integration of technologies, especially to enable multiple iterations of design and construction of strains, could typically benefit from digitalisation and automation. The incorporation of artificial learning and artificial intelligence (AI) would remove the need for laborious, time-consuming human intervention between iterations. For example, the large number of metabolic engineering studies could provide an invaluable database. This source could capture information on titre (the concentration), yield and productivity in response to genetic and fermentation conditions. These data, in turn, could be built into machine-learning models, which increasingly remove human involvement in the design-build-test cycle. The day should come when the results of one round of “test” iteration should inform the next round of “design” without human intervention.

Accelerated discovery of natural biological materials is required to explore the diversity of materials and provide access to new materials properties that are lacking. The further development of next-generation deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing and DNA synthesis is vital to such efforts. Research programmes in University of Food Technologies (UFT) in Plovdiv and Plovdiv University could embrace these new technologies to give access to the potential power of vast libraries of biological materials (natural and synthetic) to create the materials and composites of the future.