XTREAM

Microorganisms thriving in extreme environments are a largely untapped reservoir of enzymes, chemicals, and pharmaceutical compounds. Their unique metabolic pathways and regulatory mechanisms enable them to survive under harsh conditions and represent invaluable resources to produce innovative bio-products, offering solutions to address challenges that conventional model organisms cannot. However, extremophile microorganisms remain remarkably underutilized as providers of bio-based solutions. Sampling extreme environments, screening, identifying and isolating the pertinent microbes is cumbersome, costly and imposes a significant environmental footprint, resulting in low yields, elevated costs, and extended times to market. Developing innovative methodologies is imperative to surmount these barriers in the study of extremophile microbiomes, and to leverage their capabilities for ecological and economic benefits. XTREAM will unlock the potential of aquatic extremophiles for the discovery of enzymes, drugs, metabolites and chemicals by interdisciplinarily developing innovative tools to facilitate rapid, efficient and sustainable exploration of extreme microbiomes, heralding a new era in the industrial application of extremophiles. The expected results of XTREAM include discovering microbes, enzymes, resistance genes and biosynthetic clusters, with a hybrid workflow of in silico and microfluidics-based discovery, resulting in the commercialization of e.g. ≥200 enzymes for biocatalysis and biorefining, 3 new solutions for antifouling, increasing the revenue of our industrial partners by ca. 10%. XTREAM assembles 5 leading European SMEs, 4 academic teams and 4 RTOs that have pioneered approaches in functional metagenomics, extremophiles, microfluidics, microbial ecology, and synthetic biology. Diverse XTREAM partners (from synthetic biology to ingredients) at different stages in the research-to-market process provides a unique opportunity for broad value creation.