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Biotechnology

Innovation is crucial to fulfil the potential of industrial biotechnology for sustainable production of fuels, chemicals, materials, food and feed. Similarly, scientific and technological advances in environmental biotechnology are needed to enable novel approaches to water purification, and ‘waste-to-product’ processes thus contributing to a circular economy. Increased fundamental knowledge encompassing enzymes, microorganisms and processes are essential for progress in this field. The Department of Biotechnology covers this research area and, based on new insights, selects, designs and tests new biobased catalysts, micro-organisms, and processes.

The department encompasses five research sections:

Section Biocatalysis

Principal Investigators

Kristina Djanashvili

Peter-Leon Hagedoorn

Duncan McMillan

Section Industrial Microbiology

Principal Investigators

Jean-Marc Daran

Pascale Daran-Lapujade

Walter van Gulik

Rinke van Tatenhove-Pel

Section Environmental Biotechnology

Principal Investigators

Damir Brdjanovic

Rebeca Gonzalez Cabaleiro

Robbert Kleerebezem

Mark van Loosdrecht

Cristian Picioreanu

Hans Vrouwenvelder

David Weissbrodt

Section Bioprocess Engineering

Principal Investigators

Ludovic Jourdin

Adrie Straathof

Luuk van der Wielen

Section Biotechnology and Society

Principal Investigators

Patricia Osseweijer

Vacancies

Vacancies can be found at the TU Delft vacancies website and Academic Transfer.

News

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28 June 2022

Baker’s yeast with human muscle genes

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.

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28 June 2022

7.4 million euros for research into products from wastewater

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?

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26 April 2022

ERC Advanced Grant for chemical dream reactions with enzymes

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.

News

28 June 2022

Baker’s yeast with human muscle genes

Section Biocatalysis

Principal Investigators

Kristina Djanashvili

Peter-Leon Hagedoorn

Duncan McMillan

Section Industrial Microbiology

Principal Investigators

Jean-Marc Daran

Pascale Daran-Lapujade

Walter van Gulik

Rinke van Tatenhove-Pel

Section Environmental Biotechnology

Principal Investigators

Damir Brdjanovic

Rebeca Gonzalez Cabaleiro

Robbert Kleerebezem

Mark van Loosdrecht

Cristian Picioreanu

Hans Vrouwenvelder

David Weissbrodt

Section Bioprocess Engineering

Principal Investigators

Ludovic Jourdin

Adrie Straathof

Luuk van der Wielen

Section Biotechnology and Society

Principal Investigators

Patricia Osseweijer

Vacancies

Vacancies can be found at the TU Delft vacancies website and Academic Transfer.

News

25 November 2021

BEI Best MSc Graduate 2021: Alicia Rodríguez Molina!

BEI Best MSc Graduate Awards 2021 Since 2020, Delft Bioengineering Institute (BEI) organizes a cross-campus competition for MSc students who performed remarkably well at their graduation projects in bioengineering. This year, sixteen very impressive theses were submitted. After a strenuous review and discussion, the jury finally agreed that Alicia Rodríguez Molina (MSc Life Science & Technology), Akash Singh (MSc Computer Science) and Jette Bloemberg (MSc Mechanical Engineering) have delivered the most innovative, interdisciplinary bioengineering projects of 2021. On top of eternal fame, they will receive personal cash prizes of €1000, €500 and €250. 1. Alicia Rodríguez Molina (MSc Life Science & Technology) Thesis: "TPR-CHAT is a caspase-like protease that forms a complex with the CRISPR-Cas type III-E endoribonuclease effector gRAMP” Daily supervisor: Sam van Beljouw (Applied Sciences, Bionanoscience) Thesis Committee: Stan Brouns (AS/BN), Peter-Leon Hagedoorn (AS/Biotechnology), Chirlmin Joo (AS/BN) “Alicia has made large contributions to our research discovering a new CRISPR-Cas system with potentially profound implications and new applications. She has been responsible for the major discovery that links a protease (protein cleaving enzyme) to CRISPR-Cas for the first time. The protein complex she identified was named Craspase and can likely trigger cell suicide in bacteria to protect bacteria from virus infection. We anticipate that Craspase can be converted to a tool for applications in molecular diagnostics, targeted knockdown of gene expression and biomolecule activation or deactivation in cells. A patent was also filled to protect some of these ideas. Importantly, her findings were included in a paper published in Science August 26 (attached) on which she was third author.” 2. Akash Singh (MSc Computer Science) Thesis: “Unsupervised Manifold Alignment with TopoGAN” Thesis Committee: Marcel Reinders (EWI/Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics), Christoph Lofi (EWI/Web Information Systems), Ahmed Mahfouz (EWI/PRB and LUMC/Radiology), Tamim Abdelaal (LUMC/Radiology) “In his thesis, Akash developed TopoGAN, a deep learning method to solve the challenging task of integrating single cell datasets with no matching samples (i.e. cells) or features. Akash’s thesis proposes multiple innovative ideas to address this challenge. First, Akash showed that Topological Autoencoders can capture the heterogeneity of single cell data better than current approaches such as (variational autoencoders, tSNE and UMAP). This on its own is a significant contribution to the field. Second, Akash proposed an approach to tackle the instability of GAN methods in the task of manifold alignment, which can be generally applied in other fields of machine learning. Third, in evaluating the performance of his method, Akash showed that current strategies have severe shortcomings and should as such be revised to faithfully reflect the performance of different methods.” 3. Jette Bloemberg (MSc Mechanical Engineering) Thesis: “MRI-Ready Actuation System for a Self-Propelling Needle” Supervisors: Fabian Trauzettel (3mE/Biomechanical Engineering), Dimitra Dodou (3mE/BmechE), Paul Breedveld (3mE/BmechE) Thesis Committee: Paul Breedveld (3mE/BmechE), Fabian Trauzettel (3mE/BmechE), Dimitra Dodou (3mE/BmechE), Matthijs Langelaar (3mE/Precision and Microsystems Engineering), Jovana Jovanova (3mE/MTT) “Jette did a very interesting research into a new kind of self-propelled steerable needle for prostate interventions under MRI. She developed a perfectly working prototype, bio-inspired on the anatomy of parasitic wasps. (…) Based on a past PhD project in which we developed novel, self-propelling needles based on the ovipositor-anatomy of parasitic wasps, Jette brought this research to an entirely new level. In her project we wanted to evaluate ovipositor-inspired needles on human prostate tissue under MRI. This means that the design should not contain any metallic parts that react on the powerful magnetic MRI-field. To solve this issue, Jette designed an entirely novel manually-driven propulsion mechanism that she printed from plastic on Formlabs and Ulitimaker 3D-printers, thereby gaining a lot of know-how on how to design complex mechanisms with tight tolerances using 3D printers. Driven by her novel propulsion mechanism, Jette designed a very thin (Ø0,81mm) ovipositor needle composed out of six individually moveable NiTi rods. For the experiments in human prostate tissue, Jette set up a very close collaboration with a well-known urology group at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (AUMC), headed by Dr. Daniel Martijn de Bruin. Jette organised many meetings with this group, arranging human prostate tissue, and using an MRI-laboratory scanner at the AUMC for her experiments. As the space within this MRI-scanner was limited, she also developed a special experimental facility in which the tissue could be stored and moved with near zero friction.”

27 October 2021

Making artificial leather while processing wastewater

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.

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06 August 2021

New yeast species could make biotechnology more sustainable

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.

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