Sustainable refining of vegetable oil made easy with a designer phospholipase C enzyme

Abstract Enzymes are extraordinary catalysts and a preferred tool for green chemistry, but they have not evolved to tolerate the harsh conditions required in large scale chemical processes, making in most cases the replacement of inorganic catalysts extremely expensive. However, continuous knowledge generated by protein engineers help to realize the promise of using biocatalysts to address critical environmental and industrial challenges.The increasing demand for food and biofuels pressures the vegetable oil industry to continuously improve the manufacturing efficiency and at the same time to mitigate the environmental pollution caused by the refineries. Enzymatic degumming is a key enabling technology to obtain cleaner and more efficient methods, but advanced enzymes are needed for a widespread adoption. Here we present an enzymatic degumming process based on chPLC, a synthetic phospholipase C with remarkable thermal stability and catalytic properties. The process developed does not require modifications in current soybean oil factories, avoiding upfront investments, and is four times faster than the enzymatic processes available in the market. A techno-economic analysis predicts a ~60 % cost reduction for a base-case scenario, establishing the largely expected conditions to promote the global adoption of enzymatic oil degumming by refineries of all sizes.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report showing the application of a synthetic enzyme designed to address an industrial need with impact in both, the global economy and the environment, in the billion-dollar range.