9
Employees
2
Projects
The global push towards a sustainable biobased society that will support the growing world population while protecting the environment puts high demands on scientists to develop solutions that will make this aim a reality. One of the major aspects of this is the transition of our current, often environmentally unfriendly, production processes into circular processes that have a low carbon footprint and do not produce waste.
Despite significant efforts, many of our current production processes still rely heavily on fossil resources and generate significant amounts of waste streams, in some cases with a negative environmental impact. There is an urgent need to speed up the transition of these processes to sustainable circular processes. Cell factories are likely to be a large part of the solution to this challenge. Bacterial, plant, algal and fungal species all play their role in this development. They differ in the range of substrates they can efficiently convert, the range of products they can produce and the efforts involved in engineering them towards true cell factories.
Fungi are capable of converting many naturally occurring substances into components they need to grow and propagate. For this they produce extracellular enzymes that degrade polymeric compounds in the environment, such as plant biomass (consisting of polysaccharides and lignin), but also animal biomass, proteins, lipids and even plastics. The resulting small molecules are in part taken up by the fungal cell and converted through various metabolic pathways to the compounds needed by the fungus itself. Interestingly, many of these compounds are also highly valuable as replacements for chemicals we currently use in industry and that are generated from fossil sources by chemical synthesis.
Detailed understanding of the abilities of fungi to degrade natural substances and the metabolism of the resulting compounds enables us to engineer fungi to produce platform chemicals in a sustainable manner. Fungi are already used as cell factories for enzymes and metabolites that are applied in industry. Examples of this are enzymes used in food processing or biofuel production and metabolites such as citric acid that is a common food component. However, we are only scratching the surface of the possibilities. New developments are the production of alternative sweeteners such as xylitol directly from plant biomass or the production of alternative protein from agricultural waste streams. We expect fungal factories to be a major factor in reaching a biobased economy. A fungal factory, therefore, is the sustainable factory of the future!
However, developing efficient fungal cell factories requires detailed understanding of their abilities to degrade biomass-based polymers, take up the resulting mono- and oligomers, converting them to desirable products and accumulating these products (ideally) in the medium. The mission of the Fungal Biotechnology group is therefore to deepen our understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in biomass conversion by fungi and use this knowledge to develop fungal cell factories with improved performance and a wider scope of applications.
Understanding a complex biological process, such as biomass conversion, requires a multidisciplinary approach and therefore a combination of expertise, typically not found in a single person. The Fungal Biotechnology group has a strong bioinformatic/AI-driven approach where analysis of big data is a key component in every research project we do. This includes traditional bioinformatics, such as (comparative) analysis of genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome data, but also machine learning pipelines and other AI approaches to mine the data for leads for our research.
However, bioinformatics typically only provides hypotheses, and experimental validation is key to transfer this into conclusions and knowledge that can be applied for the design of novel fungal cell factories. The experimental expertise of the group covers genetics, physiology and biochemistry and integrates these with bioinformatics into efficient approaches.
We perform both classical (e.g., UV-mutagenesis, selective adaptation and sexual crossing) and molecular (including CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing) genetics using a range of different methods and species. We also develop these tools for new strains and species if needed and actively collaborate with other groups in the field to increase the efficiency and throughput of these methods. Genetics is crucial to generate engineered strains with modified metabolism, enzyme production or regulatory networks.
Physiological studies of fungi range from ‘simple’ growth profiles to detailed microscopic studies and evaluation of growth conditions and performance. This knowledge is often critical to predict the performance of these strains in industrial conditions and help us in strain selection as well as designing engineering approaches.
Biochemistry covers a range of methodologies, from specific enzyme assays to proteomic and metabolomic analysis of strain performance. Correlating this with genetic modifications and transcriptome profiles can be challenging but provides deep inside into the functionality of fungi and fungal proteins that is crucial to develop efficient cell factories.
The Fungal Biotechnology group is therefore composed of people with diverse skill sets that actively interact with each other, as well as other scientists at LIST, to obtain maximal synergy of the available expertise.
