Archive

Biotechnologist Pascale Daran-Lapujade and her group at Delft University of Technology managed to build human muscle genes in the DNA of baker’s yeast. This is the first time researchers have successfully placed such a vital human feature into a yeast cell.

Showering, cleaning, flushing toilets, and industrial production are all processes that use a great deal of water. But what happens to the waste in the water, to everything that is flushed away and disappears into the sewer system together with the water?

One of the big societal challenges today, is that the chemical industry still consumes a considerable amount of energy and resources. “This is a global issue for most, if not all, chemicals that factories produce nowadays”, says researcher Frank Hollmann. He has received a 2.5 M€ ERC Advanced Grant from the European Union to help tackle this problem over the next five years, by engineering enzymes as a catalyst for chemical reactions.

The National Growth Fund of the Dutch government grants conditional funding of 60 million euros to the Cellular Agriculture consortium, whose goal is to produce and promote protein-rich food from cultivated cells. The TU Delft is one of the founders of the consortium, with Marcel Ottens as initiator of the line of research. The TU Delft, together with the companies PlanetBio, DSM, Meatable, CE Delft and others, forms a hub in Delft for this new field of work.

The development of new technologies for biological wastewater treatment is turning our view of sludge upside down. Microbiologist Mark van Loosdrecht receives the 2022 Novozymes Prize for his pioneering work in copying and reusing nature’s mechanisms in wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Van Loosdrecht: “Treating wastewater will become good business in the future.”

Researchers from TU Delft found an unexpected new enzyme intermediate at work in enzymes that contain heme, a cofactor that’s vital for many processes in our body such as the breaking down of toxins in the liver. The researchers used new, rapid techniques, which are less invasive than existing methods. The results, published in ACS Catalysis, increase our understanding of heme proteins and enzymes and how they can be engineered.

Leather is a strong product but has been getting bad press lately due to the fact that it is made of animal skins and the production process is a burden on the environment. The TU Delft student team WaterSkins has come up with a very sustainable alternative: artificial leather made during the treatment of wastewater.

Yeasts usually need oxygen to reproduce. However, researchers at TU Delft have now come across a highly unusual species of yeast that is capable of rapid growth even without oxygen. How does it do that? By replacing an essential component of the normal yeast cell with a surrogate molecule. In theory, this discovery could make the industrial production of beer and biofuels using yeasts more sustainable and efficient. The results of this study have been published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Researchers led by Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) used 3D printing to create a novel, environmentally-friendly and living material made of algae that has many potential applications.

Researcher Deborah Gernat has created a new method to further develop the taste of non-alcoholic beer, in collaboration with Heineken. The technique, which is based on molecular sieves, gives brewers a new tool to bring the taste of non-alcoholic beer closer to that of regular beer. The first tests showed that the sweet 'wort taste' that often characterizes alcohol-free beer can be reduced using this method. On April 9th, Deborah Gernat will receive her doctorate on this subject at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).