The SUSBIND European Project organizes its Final Online Conference

The Final Online Conference organized by the SUSBIND European Project will be held on June 1, 2022. The Group of Biotechnology for Lignocellulosic Biomass at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas Margarita Salas participates in the event with a presentation by the postdoctoral researcher Juan Carro on “Emerged Enzymatic Technologies: From Fungus to Innovative Biocatalysts (UPOs)”, who will highlight the main work carried out by the group during the project.

The wood board industry currently relies on the use of mainly fossil-based binders, largely formaldehyde-based binders. A number of initiatives are underway to produce alternative solutions from renewable resources, but a bio-based binder at an industrial scale does not yet exist. SUSBIND’s partnership of six research and five industry partners has made substantial progress in developing highly sustainable bio-based binders that will in the future replace conventional ones currently used for wood-based panel boards in furniture mass products.

Within this initiative, the role of the CIB group, in collaboration with the Plant Biomass group of IRNAS-CSIC, was to investigate the enzymatic oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids of vegetable oils to form epoxides and other derivatives of interest for renewable and healthier board adhesives, by the so-called unspecific peroxygenases (UPOs), a new type of oxidative biocatalyst with high biotechnological potential.

After more than four years of collaborative work, this conference will showcase the innovative solutions the project delivers in terms of novel technologies to obtain bio-based binders, based on the enzymatic conversion of lipids mentioned above, as well as on the thermo/chemical conversion of carbohydrates, both of them scalable and applicable in numerous industrial relevant environments.

Moreover, the SUSBIND final online conference will examine current and future trends in and beyond the binder market for furniture and check the applicability of similar solutions in research and other industry fields. The aim of this global online conference is to share experiences, open debates for future trends and comparable projects, attract the attention of relevant stakeholders, and reach out to a broad audience.

For more information and free registration, you can follow this link.

Details about the SUSBIND project can be found here.