The Big Picture

Global Concerns

The economic, political, and environmental concerns surrounding petroleum dependence are deep, global, and pose great opportunity for innovation.

Ideal Solution

So, what would the ideal solution to these global concerns look like? How does the LS9 vision apply? It would be:

• Cost effective and competitive
• Sustainable, renewable, with low environmental impact
• Scalable to meet demand
• Flexible in using diverse feedstocks
• Inherently safer operationally
• Diverse in product portfolio
• Simple, efficient with processes capable of shifting from product to product
• Create diverse job opportunities

LS9’s Solution

LS9 was founded on the basis of crafting a technology which best accomplishes these objectives using the power of microbiology and the broad global capacity for carbohydrates.

Why microbiology?

Microbes offer us, gratis, more than a billion years of natural development. They are:

• Selective
• Efficient
• Ambient
• Aqueous

Microbiology showcases the state of the art in genetic engineering, with:

• Computational design
• Automated, parallel construction and evaluation of genes, pathways and organisms
• Thousands of strains constructed and evaluated each week

Why carbohydrates?

LS9 focuses on carbohydrates because Earth is a sustainable carbohydrate machine.

Carbohydrates are nature’s building block and energy source. The bioproducts industry is spurring innovation, which will drive improvements in the production of existing carbohydrate agriculture, as well as new products for the industry.

New bioproduct driven innovation will increase, not reduce, the world’s food supply. For example, Brazil’s current sugar-cane farms yield 80 tons per hectare. Projected technology improvements in agriculture will increase sugar-cane yields to 160 tons per hectare.

In addition, new crops, designed specifically for bioproduct feedstock, will use nonagrarian land, require less water, tolerate more salt and use nitrogen more efficiently. Their introduction will:

• Extend current growing seasons
• Reduce land-animal farming excesses
• Increase nonfood carbohydrates

New technologies are emerging to extract carbohydrates and sugars from diverse cellulosic biomass materials – wood chips, corn stover, sugar cane bagasse. LS9’s product technology can utilize all of the existing and new sources as feedstock