Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission is a massive problem for our climate; this is well-known. We urgently need measures to prevent earth from the big collapse. Where do we find them? Biotechnology offers some interesting solutions.

The modern business world is using a new buzzword: “Open innovation”. What does it mean? How “open” do we need to be? What could be the benefit? And what does it look like in reality?

More efficiency, more quality, more process safety, less costs, less waste – these are the target specifications of each and every production process in chemical industry. It seems quite ambitious to meet all these requirements, but a new key word has entered the engineering world: process intensification!

Research funding is a highly competitive process and only a small fraction of applicants get the grant in the end. EU-Horizon 2020, with almost 80 billion Euros the largest research program worldwide, has an average success rate of only 14%. What is the secret of success of those, who have made it? 

Did you know that nowadays bacteria and mammalian cells, especially hamster cells, produce a wide range of drugs? And who tells them to do so? The answer is the four-letter code of DNA. Biotechnologists spend a lot of time to explore natural DNA sequences of different organisms for production. The Chinese Hamster is a mammalian system and suits well for cell factories because of its similarity to human cells. However, for a long time the knowledge about the hamster DNA sequence had many gaps that needed to be investigated.

Sugar is not only a widely used food ingredient but can also be used as possible starting point for high-added-value products. The European research consortium of CARBAFIN explores different ways to make use of sugar beet biomass: the sugar components glucose and fructose are starting points for the production of important ingredients for not only food/feed but also cosmetics. Besides, fructose can be further converted to a platform chemical, which is applied to the production of bioplastics, biofuels or biopolymers, as well as resins. In other words, CARBAFIN people sweeten our lives!

First of all, welcome in 2018 and a happy new year full of interesting success stories of biotech! Hopefully, you had a good time with your family and friends and found some time to relax? Certainly, many of us also enjoyed a colorful fireworks display to get into the new year. But – as we all know – fireworks are causing air pollution.

Yeast cells are important workhorses for the “green” production of various chemicals and proteins. In many cases the biotechnological industry favours the secretive production of their target compounds, because of lower costs for purification and less complicated downstream processing. But the way from an intracellularly produced protein through the cellular secretion machinery to the outside of the cell is very long and hides numerous obstacles.  Researchers all over the world are looking for methods to overcome these hurdles  – so do acib researchers.

The mankind flies to the moon, explores the universe – but still on earth there is much more unexplored matter than we are aware of. Bioprospecting is a discipline, where new products and processes are discovered based on natural resources. The big ideas and innovations for industrial processes are right in front of us – we just have to observe nature and – which is the difficulty – recognize them.

Products derived from industrial biotechnology often compete with chemical processes. But what are the main aspects for successful applications of industrial biotechnology in manufacturing? Processes should be fast, cost-efficient and – from technological point of view – biocatalysts and enzymes need to deal with harsh process conditions.