Using advanced fermentation technology, industrial biotech startup Manus Bio hopes to make manufacturing flavors, fragrances, and other products greener and more cost-effective.

The spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created what it says is a low-cost process for engineering microbes with complex metabolic pathways borrowed from plants. These can produce an array of rare and expensive ingredients used to manufacture noncaloric beverages, perfumes, toothpastes, detergents, pesticides, and even therapeutics, among other products.

Manus Bio created a for engineering microbes with metabolic pathways borrowed from plantsMoreover, the reprogrammed microbes allow for more control in identifying and extracting compounds along the metabolic pathway, which could lead to discoveries of new compound ingredients.

Most recently, Manus has recreated a natural plant process in microbes to cheaply produce mass quantities of a stevia plant compound for a zero-calorie sweetener, called Rebaudioside M (Reb M), that’s noted for being much sweeter than today’s commercial alternatives. In nature, around .01% of the compound can be extracted from the stevia plant, so companies extract a more abundant but more bitter compound.

Manus engineered bacteria to mimic the stevia plant’s metabolic pathway. When put through the startup’s fermentation process, the bacteria produced the compound at greater than 95% purity.

Production of the new sweetener demonstrates how Manus’ microbial engineering can be used to make more refined flavors and other products more cost effectively, says MIT professor Gregory Stephanopoulos, who co-founded the startup and co-invented the core technology with former postdoc and current Manus CEO Ajikumar Parayil.

Another product in Manus’ pipeline is a compound called nootkatone, a component found in grapefruit that is used as an environmentally friendly insect repellent. It currently costs several thousand dollars per kilogram to produce through traditional methods. But, produced more cheaply and in greater qualities, it could be used as an environmentally safe way to help fight Lyme disease, malaria, zika virus, and other insect-borne pathogens.

The core technology traces back to work Stephanopoulos and Parayil began at MIT. In the mid-2000s, the two researchers modified the complex metabolic pathway in bacteria that produces isoprenoids, a diverse group of more than 60,000 molecules that are used to make many products, including therapeutics. Tweaking that pathway for commercial purposes has been done before, but special attention was paid to the amount of product produced.