https://www.epe.ed.tum.de/biovt

The Chair of Biochemical Engineering is dealing withthe manufacturing of bioproducts from µg to the industrial scale. The focus is on the design and control of heterotrophic as well as autotrophic microbial processes in bioreactors from mL- to the m³-scale applying engineering tools across multiple scales, e.g. protein engineering, molecular dynamics, synthetic biotechnology, omic-tools, metabolic control analysis, computational fluid dynamics as well as automation with robotic systems and digitalization of biomanufacturing.

Within the Munich Multiscale Biofabrication Network two collaborations have been established so far:  (1) In collaboration with the Simmel-Lab (TUM Chair of Physics of Synthetic Biological Systems) synthetic anaerobic biofilms will be designed and manufactured for CO₂ recycling applying membrane bioreactors. Since the H₂/CO₂ or CO metabolizing acetogenic microorganisms can only produce short-chain organic acids and alcohols, the combination with other anaerobic microorganisms offers a suitable solution, which can form longer-chain organic molecules from these compounds as part of a synthetic spatial resolved co-culture in the biofilm. (2) In close collaboration with the Dietz-Lab (TUM Chair of Biomolecular Nanotechnology) we focus on the scalable mass production of synthetic DNA nano-objects up to the multi-kg scale: microbial production of synthetic, non-infectious phagemid particles with user defined ssDNA, isolation of ssDNA and autocatalytic self-assembly of DNA nano-objects. For application in the pharmaceutical field, contamination by DNA fragments and endotoxins must be excluded. The scale-up up to the m³-scale will be studied at the TUM Pilot Plant for Industrial Biotechnology in Garching.