Přehled

Title: Bioreactor optimization for cultivation of extremophiles
Study program: Biomedical Technology and Bioinformatics
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Karel Sedlář, PhD

Topic description:

White biotechnology, i.e. a technology that uses living cells to produce value added chemicals, usually loses the competition with standard petrochemical production due to higher financial costs. The reason can be found in the need to protect these processes against contamination. This inefficiency could be reduced by using naturally robust organisms, so called extremophiles. However, these organisms are not so well studied, partly also because of the lack of instrumentation for extremophilic cultivation on a small scale in laboratory bioreactors.

The topic is focused on developing a small laboratory bioreactor especially suited for thermophilic cultivations. Large industrial processes usually generate waste heat that is unfavourable for mesophiles and needs to be reduced for them to proliferate. On the other hand, this environment is naturally suitable for extremophiles, particularly thermophiles. Unlike large scale processes, small scale lab cultivation does not produce waste heat, therefore, the heat has to be added for successful cultivation and research of thermophiles. Such experiments are needed to develop novel concepts as the Next-Generation Industrial Biotechnology concept that relies on the use of naturally robust
organisms. Unfortunately, small bioreactors designed for thermophilic cultivations are currently missing. The aim of the research is to develop novel hardware for cultivations of bacterial thermophiles and its software control for various cultivation modes. A wide range of currently available parts will be used rather than building the reactor up from scratch. Platforms like Chi.Bio can be used as a base for it presents an open system orchestrated through Arduino and programmable in Python. Thus, it offers almost unlimited possibilities for bioreactor augmentation.

The project will be solved mainly at the Department of Biomedical Engineering. However, cooperation with our national (University Hospital Brno, the Faculty of Chemistry BUT, and Czech Collection of Microorganisms) and foreign partners (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany and HESSO Valais-Wallis in Switzerland) is expected. PhD students will complete a six-month internship at attractive partner universities abroad. UBMI provides doctoral students with a stipend and/or a parttime contract beyond the state stipend when joining a grant project or engaging in teaching.

Your task:

  • Desing your own bioreactor.
  • Deploy your own computation pipelines to control the cultivation.

Requirements:

  • Previous education in bioinformatics, microelectronics, or informatics.
  • Good communications skills and desire to work on yourself.

We offer:

  • To join young investigator’s team solving cutting-edge projects.
  • Possibility to travel to foreign conferences and cooperating institutions.

For more information about this topic please contact Karel Sedlář – sedlar@vut.cz

How to apply:

Please apply and submit your motivation letter and CV via university website from April 1 to April 30, https://www.vut.cz/eprihlaska/cs/zadani/vybrat-obor/fakulta/5

Funding:
Funding is provided as a combination of part-time or full-time research projects and/or regular scholarships.

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