Vortrag: Harmonizing microbial biotechnology: from strain to bioprocess engineering

Fermentation (today known as microbial biotechnology) is one of the oldest industries of human mankind. The access towards novel bioproducts in microbial biotechnology relies on the design of the microbial overproduction strains as well as the bioprocess strategy.

Bioprocess engineering is challenged by the forthcoming transition into a circular (bio)economy. The number and complexity of newly designed microbial bioprocesses will steadily increase upon the upcoming decades in order to realize sustainable and carbon-optimized processes. Thus, bioprocess development and scale-up has to be performed more rapidly and with high precision to guarantee new production processes with high quality. In contrast to state of the art technical-driven bioprocess engineering concepts, a holistic and better understanding of the biocatalyst within a bioprocess should be considered to build new and powerful concepts for the prediction of the optimal bioprocess parameter space.

In the here presented talk, I would like to (i) give insights about strain and bioprocess engineering concepts in microbial biotechnology with the example of high-value terpenoid production and (ii) present the concept of a biological-driven bioprocess scale-up, that considers holistic and biological transcriptomic data sets from microbial bioprocesses. Next generation sequencing approaches are powerful tools that have the potential to understand bioprocesses with a better spatial temporal resolution and envisioning a bioprocess control that relies on real-time biological data. The aim of the recent study is a transcriptional profiling that allows a mapping of the biology of a bioprocess towards the technical parameter space and thus has the potential to harmonize strain and bioprocess engineering strategies.