Proposed Implementation

1. Raw Material Sources

The core innovation of our project lies in converting Waste Oil (WO) into high-value squalene, achieving “turning waste into treasure.” Our project’s success relies on a stable, reliable, and scalable raw material supply chain. Waste oil is the raw material we use to produce squalene, and we have three main sources:

Catering Industry

• Restaurants and school canteens are our current main sources of waste oil
• The catering industry covers a vast number of restaurants, hotel kitchens, schools, and corporate canteens in cities, providing wide sources

Food Processing Factories

• Food processing plants are important sources of waste oil
• Large factories producing instant noodles, potato chips, fried snacks, etc., regularly replace large amounts of frying oil
• Cooperation with a few large factories can provide substantial raw materials
• Significantly reduces logistics costs and complexity of collection and transportation
• Ensures stable supply

Residential Communities

• Establish community waste oil recycling stations
• Enhance environmental awareness through public education
• Expand raw material sources while increasing project social impact and public participation

2. Target Customers & Application Scenarios

High-Purity Squalene

• Supply to cosmetic companies as ingredient for skincare and antioxidant products

Medium-Purity Squalene

• Direct supply to squalene processing plants or raw material companies for further purification and redistribution
• Can be hydrogenated to produce high-purity squalane for cosmetic applications

Our strategy ensures smooth transition from laboratory fermentation to industrial production and cosmetic applications, while flexibly matching different purity products with downstream channels according to market demand.

Additionally, our squalene has potential applications in health products, nutritional supplements, and materials fields.

a. Green Cosmetics Industry

High-Purity Squalene/Squalane

• As moisturizing and antioxidant ingredients in high-end skincare products
• Direct supply to domestic and international cosmetic brands (such as Proya, L’Oréal, Shiseido, etc.)

Core Advantages: a Green and Sustainable: Raw materials from waste oil recycling, avoiding dependence on shark fishing and high-energy plant extraction b Cost Advantage: Extremely low raw material costs, production costs significantly lower than olive oil extraction or sucrose fermentation routes, strong product price competitiveness c “Cruelty-Free” and “ESG Compliance”: Our products completely avoid ecological and ethical issues of animal-derived squalane, complying with international cosmetic companies’ emphasis on “Cruelty-Free” and ESG goals

Emphasize “green traceable supply chain” to help brands enhance environmental value in market promotion. Can also transform into “environmental protection skincare co-branded products.” Through cooperation with cosmetic companies, the project can not only play a role in environmental protection but also use “green technology” as the core selling point of the fashion industry.

b. Raw Material Companies and Chemical Plants

We form strategic partnerships with raw material companies, providing medium-concentration squalene as raw material. We focus on upstream fermentation production and preliminary purification, providing them with stable, reliable, and traceable “green” squalene raw materials. These companies can then use their mature global distribution networks, deep processing capabilities, and customer relationships to distribute our products directly or after deep processing.

c. Research Institutions and Universities

We are willing to open the engineered strains, plasmid systems, hardware design solutions, and digital twin models constructed by the project for subsequent research by scientific research teams. For example, users can:

• Adjust or optimize metabolic pathways to increase flux
• Explore strain synergistic co-culture systems
• Develop new bioprocesses based on our integrated fermentation system (iFPS)
• Build intelligent fermentation systems

We have established preliminary contact with some industrial biotechnology research institutes and university laboratories, hoping to conduct in-depth cooperation in the future to jointly promote the development of green biomanufacturing.

d. Other iGEM Teams

Our strains, metabolic modules, and hardware design can serve as demonstration cases for synthetic biology education and project development, providing inspiration and technical reference for future teams.

3. Safety

To ensure project safety during implementation and future application stages, we have designed a comprehensive safety strategy covering environments beyond the laboratory. Our engineered strain Yarrowia lipolytica is a BSL-1 organism on the iGEM White List, and all genetic constructs use non-toxic genetic elements and safe metabolic pathways. Considering scale-up and practical applications, we designed multi-layer biocontainment mechanisms, including inducible kill switches, auxotrophic protection mechanisms, and light-induced suicide systems, ensuring strains cannot survive outside controlled conditions.

Environmental safety is further ensured through hardware and process design: bioreactor outputs and waste undergo multiple inactivation treatments, including thermal sterilization, UV irradiation, and microfiltration. Our equipment adopts tight sealing structures, with sterile-grade membranes installed at inlets and outlets, and equipped with blue light emitters to trigger the suicide system, thereby preventing accidental microbial release. These measures ensure that even in application scenarios, engineered strains can be effectively controlled.

All operating procedures and safety designs are reviewed under the guidance of the team safety officer and institutional biosafety standards. This implementation-oriented safety strategy ensures that the project maintains the highest safety standards from laboratory research to potential field or industrial applications, complies with iGEM’s “Do Not Release” policy, and minimizes environmental and human health risks.

4. Future Design

1. Product Levels

Our research starts in the laboratory. At the laboratory stage, we have achieved detectable squalene output and flux increase. In the future, we hope to scale up the production of this product.

From Laboratory Squalene to Industrial Squalene:

• Cooperate with existing fermentation plants (such as bio-manufacturing industrial parks or synthetic biology enterprises) for scale-up verification
• Optimize upstream feeding (waste oil recovery and purification) and downstream extraction (centrifugation, extraction, microfluidic purification) processes

Industrial-grade Squalene:

• Will achieve medium to high purity
• Can be directly supplied as raw material to chemical plants or processing plants for further purification and hydrogenation

We plan to cooperate with daily chemical enterprises or raw material companies to enter the skincare product production chain after meeting safety, stability, and testing standards, forming a complete “waste oil → biosynthetic squalene → industrial hydrogenated squalane → green cosmetics” chain.

2. Environmental Education

Making ordinary citizens one of our sources of waste oil is not due to insufficient waste oil supply, but a core component of our brand building. This is part of our “turning waste into treasure” story, which can enhance the project’s social recognition and brand reputation.

3. Business Analysis

To comprehensively evaluate its commercial feasibility and future development path, we conducted an in-depth SWOT analysis.

Strengths

• Core advantages: innovative green raw materials and significant cost-effectiveness
• Solving environmental pollutant problems while complying with global sustainable development trends
• Completely avoiding ethical dilemmas of animal-derived squalene, perfectly aligning with the cosmetics industry’s “cruelty-free” gold standard
• Production costs much lower than traditional olive oil extraction or sucrose fermentation routes, building solid market competition barriers
• Flexible production of different purity products through purification process control, precisely matching diverse needs from high-end cosmetics companies to raw material processing plants
• Innovative, open bio-manufacturing platform laying solid foundation for continuous technological iteration and R&D cooperation

Weaknesses

• Main challenges: technical maturity and difficulties in scale-up production
• Key technical bottlenecks: stable scale-up of laboratory results to industrial scale, ensuring purification efficiency and product batch consistency
• Fluctuations in wasted oil raw materials (source, composition, impurity content) may affect fermentation stability and product yield, posing higher requirements for quality control
• Market education costs needed to eliminate some consumers’ concerns about product safety regarding the “source from waste oil” concept
• Strict regulatory approval and long market access cycles as a new cosmetic ingredient

Opportunities

• Excellent market timing with growing global consumer demand for green, sustainable, and “clean beauty” products
• Broad market space provided by young generation’s increasing environmental awareness
• Brand owners actively seeking innovative raw materials meeting their ESG goals, creating cooperation opportunities
• Government support policies for circular economy and waste resource utilization (subsidies, tax incentives) effectively reducing operational costs and enhancing project competitiveness
• Open technology platform facilitating cooperation with research institutions or enterprises to jointly explore new applications of squalene in health products, biomaterials, and other fields, opening new growth curves

Threats

• Primary threat: fierce market competition
• Simultaneous competition against traditional shark liver oil, plant extraction routes, and other companies using synthetic biology technology (sucrose fermentation)
• Potential negative consumer perceptions from improper communication about “waste oil raw materials,” affecting terminal brand reputation and market penetration
• Complex regulatory barriers for cosmetic ingredients in different countries and regions, bringing uncertainty and high compliance costs for product globalization
• Supply chain risks including equipment bottlenecks in large-scale production, instability of waste oil recycling networks, and logistics challenges

Figure SWOT Analysis Diagram

5. Challenges

1. Yield and Conversion Rate Improvement: The current squalene yield still needs to be further improved, future focus on pathway optimization and fermentation process control

2. Process Scale-up and Stability: Stable scale-up of laboratory processes to industrial scale is the core of successful industrialization, requiring close cooperation with fermentation engineering experts

3. Cooperation and Verification: We are actively seeking to establish cooperation with cosmetic raw material suppliers and bio-manufacturing factories for pilot verification and joint development, jointly promoting the commercialization process of this green product

Through this comprehensive implementation plan, we are committed to successfully bringing the squalene project from laboratory innovation concept to the market, ultimately contributing to the realization of green, sustainable biomanufacturing.