New EU project with the French Metabolome platform in Toulouse

The EU initiative IBISBA - Industrial Biotechnology Innovation and Synthetic Biology Accelerator - enables researchers to collaborate transnationally with leading technology platforms to connect top-level biotechnology research within Horizon 2020. Our new project "High Flux" has been selected for the first funding initiative IBISBA 1.0.

Specifically, our team will collaborate with METATOUL, the metabolome platform in Toulouse, to elucidate the metabolism of cyanobacteria. These photosynthetic microorganisms can conduct photosynthesis and, furthermore, use sugars and other energy sources for a heterotrophic metabolism in the dark and in the light. With their potential for the synthesis of value-added products - only from carbon dioxide, light and water - they are regarded as cell factories of the future. The prerequisite for their later industrial use is first of all a much better understanding of their metabolic pathways. This is particularly needed for a targeted optimization of biosynthetic power for which individual metabolic pathways have to be reprogrammed and redirected. In the framework of the DFG project "Cyano Flux" we are currently investigating the important model bacterium Synechocystis together with the University of Kiel. For this purpose, we use our internationally leading expertise in the field of 13C metabolic flux analysis coupled with mass spectrometry. In the future, we will be able to collaborate on Synechocystis with the METATOUL platform, which exhibits outstanding nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy technologies. Their measurements provide novel information from our isotope studies that well complement our mass spectrometry data, promising an even more comprehensive and detailed picture of the metabolic pathways.

Foto: Cyanobacteria @ work.