Revision as of 21:49, 14 July 2015

This page is in progress!

Our Projects:

Curli fibres

Our main goal is to produce new nutrition out of agrar-culture waste. Therefore we combined the best features of chemistry and biology for the degradation of cellulose to glucose. In this regard, we took the chemical degration of cellulose via phosphoric acid and combined it with the biological way of storing it in a stable hydroxylapatite matrix. This matrix is build up of modified curli fibres, on which the hydroxylapatite crystalized out and can be reactivated by lacto bacillus. This system is an enclosed cellulose capsule, which maintains a high and stable phosphoric acid concentration. Through the high and local concentration of phosphoric acid the surrounding cellulose gets efficiently degraded. Main advantages are that the phosphoric acid can be handled safely.

Synthetic Chromosome and Minicells

The Synthetic Chromosome is derived form the secondary Chromosome of Vibrio Cholerae. The structure and stability of this genetic element opens up the possibility of adding a lot of genetic information on it. We are planning to place different pathways on it including for example the beta-carotene pathway. As our final goal is to have cells that primarily produce our compound we are planning to erase all other information from the cell by digesting the main host chromosome at a given time point.
The other path that we are following is using a system where the cells divide unequally and therefore produce so called mini cells. In these cells there is no host chromosome but by chance our synthetic chromosome with its encoded information. These mini cells will then be producing only our wanted compounds.
With both approaches the cells will be technical not longer alive because they are not able to divide anymore. Therefore we can minimize the risk of setting genetically modified organisms free. This allows us to use them for many different purposes. On the one hand we build with this a technology that allows us to produce a variety of different chemical compounds in a semi cell-free systems. Our projects will solve the bottlenecks of cell free productions systems e.g. the production and purification of enzymes. On the other hand we can also look in more advanced applications including for example using them as a targeted drug delivery system. We are planning to do experiments where the pathway is just expressed when a signaling molecule e.g. form a pathogenic bacteria is secreted.
We hope we could highlight the context where we placed our project in and what are the benefits.