Squalene acts as a booster for potential vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. However, the richest squalene source, shark liver, can and should not be exploited further. acib offers a solution: Yeast cell factories can be designed via biotechnological tools to produce high amounts of squalene.
Globally, the search for potential drugs and vaccines is proceeding rapidly. A collaborative acib-research project focuses on the identification, evaluation and pre-clinical testing of a certain group of active ingredients, combining faster availability with high effectiveness. These so-called antiviral drugs have been used in the fights against HIV, MERS and SARS. They can inhibit the multiplication rates of enzymes or prevent virus particles from invading lung cells and consequently avert possible infections. This makes them effective tools in the fight against COVID-19.
Some magnetic materials are able to absorb electro-magnetic waves and transform them into heat. But how do they do it? And is there a single mechanism or an optimum frequency for this process? To answer these and other fundamental questions of magnetic heating, first some introductory concepts must be clarified related to the magnetic response of the materials to a magnetic field.
Contactless magnetic heating may sound scary, but it is part of your daily life experience. Every time you heat-up your morning coffee mocha with an induction cooker, you are using magnetic fields and magnetic materials. But can this kind of heating also be used to solve high-tech problems? This is the question that scientists are trying to answer in the H2020-FETOPEN project HOTZYMES.
Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has turned the whole world upside down. After weeks of curfew to relieve the national health care systems, the economic impact becomes more and more perceptible: We are facing a substantial crisis. The only way out of this misery is finding a) an effective drug for the treatment of COVID-19 or b) a safe vaccine, which prevents us from a Coronavirus infection.
It is still winter outside, and some may wish warmer temperatures to come soon. While humans sometimes need warmth to get going, cold-inducible promoters from Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells turned out to be interesting tools for the production of biopharmaceuticals at low temperatures.
Automation is the future of numerous processes – not only in our everyday life but also in more specialized areas such as bioprocessing. Researchers are eager to find solutions in order to replace routine steps by automated process sections. This gives them the opportunity to spend the gained time on more meaningful things: thinking about new innovations!
While currently most production processes for biopharmaceuticals are assessed by laboriuos and time-consuming off-line analytics, a new process enables the monitoring of such processes in real-time. Sensors combined with mathematical models deliver information on the quality and quantity of the product, as well as on content and profile impurities. This allows an instant monitoring of processes, making processes safer, faster, cheaper and more efficient.
Scientists from the Department of Biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna and the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology (acib) discovered a gene switch in yeast, that was able to change twelve genes – and thereby the metabolic process of yeast as a whole. This work explains evolutionary events that happened more than 120 million years ago. The results have recently been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications and have the potential to be used in the food and feed industry and for the production of bio fuels and new building blocks for bioplastics.
An interdisciplinary team of scientists is pioneering the development of synthetic glycobiology and trains 15 young researchers in the enabling technologies that underpin the development and exploitation of glycoscience: An exciting topic that promises to bring innovative solutions for the future!