Verenium Corporation, is a San Diego

San Diego, California

San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

-based industrial biotechnology

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

 company that specializes in the development of high performance enzyme

Enzyme

Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of the process, called substrates, are converted into different molecules, called products. Almost all chemical reactions in a biological cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates...

s. Verenium's tailored enzymes are environmentally friendly, making products and processes greener and more cost-effective for industries including the global food and fuel

Fuel

Fuel is any material that stores energy that can later be extracted to perform mechanical work in a controlled manner. Most fuels used by humans undergo combustion, a redox reaction in which a combustible substance releases energy after it ignites and reacts with the oxygen in the air...

 markets.

Using proprietary and patented genomic technologies, Verenium extracts microbial DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

 directly from collected samples to avoid the slow and often impossible task of growing microbes in the laboratory. Verenium then mines its collection of microbial genes

Gênes

Gênes is the name of a département of the First French Empire in present Italy, named after the city of Genoa. It was formed in 1805, when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the Republic of Genoa. Its capital was Genoa, and it was divided in the arrondissements of Genoa, Bobbio, Novi Ligure, Tortona and...

, numbering in the billions, using high-throughput screening technologies designed to identify unique enzymes as product candidates. As required, these enzymes can then be further optimized for commercial use through the Company's patented DirectEvolution® technologies. By combining discovery and laboratory evolution technologies, Verenium has successfully developed and commercialized a suite of highly differentiated enzyme products tailored to meet the specific needs of companies in various markets, including grain and oilseed processing, biofuels, animal health and nutrition and other industry.