It costs a small town hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to clean wastewater or risk even higher EPA fines and people’s health. Wastewater that is unfit to drink or discharge to waterways must be treated by a series of microbial processes culminating in anaerobic digestion. MTE provides solutions for increasing the rate of anaerobic digestion, the yield of biogas, and for co-production of high-value renewable hydrocarbons so that even small communities can see a revenue return instead of a taxpayer cost for efficiently cleaning wastewater.

Using the universal concepts of thermodynamics, enzyme kinetics, and metabolism we can coax living organisms to perform better and more efficiently than they do in nature. MTE provides solutions for using microbes to produce fuel from CO2 and renewable carbon feedstocks, such as excess sugar from corn or other non-food crops, wood, or waste biomass.

Microbes naturally exist in complex communities, or mixtures. MTE has expertise in encouraging synergistic behaviors in robust natural microbial communities, as well as in designing communities to achieve desired biosynthetic capabilities.

MTE has technology for creating new and better enzymes based on strategies using selection, and directed or designed modifications. These include ExtremaseTM cocktails for feedstock conversion to accelerate ethanol, biogas, and biohydrogen synthesis, and enzymes that promote metabolic balancing in evolved and engineered cell lines.