THE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS - IFEAT

want to do saffron, availability cannot be a limiting factor in terms of how it can be put to a lot ofhuman beings in the world. So this is one of the things that we are very very keen on.You can see that is one of the reasons we chased the four types of products listed. This is what is likelyto be in the market between 2013 to 2015, so we are not probably in the next generation, or we are notin 2030, because these are all compounds which we believe will take us very quickly there. Of coursethere are all these regulatory issues that I do not want to get into, which we are presently doing, andpursuing and things like that.Vanillin because we believe that the natural vanillin is so expensive, the synthetic version is certainnot a very preferred choice for a lot of people. So this is giving us a very niche space wherein we aregiving them a fermented vanillin. We have done a taste panel, we have evaluated it, some of theleading players have checked it and they find that this is so good that it is as good as what they haveseen possibly in the natural space.Then we have a set of anti-fungals, which are absolutely an inspiration from pomegranate, and youknow this is now becoming another plant that is so good. And that’s another product, and we havesome anti-fungals that we are using and want to use for the food industry primarily.Stevia, as you know, is going to be the next big thing which is happening in the world and we are verymuch there. We have made Rebaudioside D in sample forms, and it is been tested by a lot of people,particularly some of the companies that are sitting here, and they feel this is absolutely good. I thinkwe are the first in the world to have a very high purity Rebaudioside D, even for testing purposes orevaluation purposes by a panel of people who could actually taste it. So this is one of the otherproducts, so this is likely to come out after all its regulatory issues in 2015.Saffron, obviously that is something that I really think has been a game changer in terms of how wehave used the synthetic biology. There are three compounds which constitute what is within what iscalled saffron, the smell, the colour and the taste and we have separated out all the three, picked outthe genes which are responsible, and put it into yeast. So technically this yeast now can make all thethree separately, it can make the colour, it can make the aroma, it can make the taste as well. I mean itsabsolutely amazing because you really don’t need to go and get 250,000 plants to get a kilo, and youreally don’t have to be in Iran to harvest any of this. So this is one of the things that you may like toknow.We have a very interesting model. We are a B2B company, which means obviously we do not go outto the people there, we sell our ingredients and we apply our technology. Among the partnerships Ithink the previous speaker mentioned BASF so I assume they have moved to Switzerland now, morethan to Germany, so they are working with us on this, and this is hardcore synthetic biology again.So we presume that, as a company of about 8 years old, we are actually addressing some of the unmetneeds in the industry, and we are chasing compounds which will be really useful and which can beindustrially scaled up, so this explains to you in a nutshell what we are doing. And just to give you anindication, that these compounds through fermentation is not really far off, I mean they are just about acouple of years away. In the USA, I believe there are already a few compounds which are through thesame technology, and so I think you are going to see more of these companies coming in in the future,in terms of how they can assembly pathways and put them together to get to the stage where they canindustrialise them and make them available through fermentation routes for companies.So this is all I wanted to present today, thank you very much for your attention.212