National Biodiversity Future Centre
Spoke 6 – Biodiversity and Human Wellbeing
Activity 3 – Biotechnology and Biodiversity
Why
- Biodiversity remains an underrated source of interesting strategies and technologies, therefore its study can provide tool to protect biodiversity itself and to unlock innovative and more sustainable processes.
- There is a need to rethink industrial processes within the framework of the circular bioeconomy.
- Residual biomasses are underexploited, yet rich in valuable molecules.
- Current production methods often ignore the safe-by-design principle, and compromise environmental sustainability.
- Microbial biodiversity offers opportunities to produce functional food, bio-based materials, and therapeutic molecules through green biotechnologies and Nature Positive solutions.
What
The mission of our activity is to promote innovative solutions to improve urban health and well-being, integrating sustainability and economic development.
We aim at designing and developing new technological processes aimed at producing materials and molecules through sustainable processes, identify new biocatalytic pathways and activities, and optimize and increase the extraction of bioactive molecules, a including from urban waste materials, enhancing them as resources for new uses.
Our research group is involved in three main actions as part of the Activity 3 – Biotechnology and Biodiversity:
- Biodiversity and biofoundry: microbial production of chemical platforms from renewable biomasses, following the principles of biomanufacturing and biorefinery
- Microbial biodiversity of natural or anthropogenic niches for production of primary interest: food, drinks and novel bioactive molecules
- A rational by design (or Safe and Sustainable by Design) approach for novel polymers and materials: microbial biodegrading communities and their potential towards upcycling and novel synthesis of materials.
How
Development of biorefineries and bioprocesses based on the valorisation of biodiversity in terms of residual biomasses as starting raw material for both fermentable sugars and metabolic building blocks; microbes as cell factories and gene as parts for synthetic biology, for the production of molecules of industrial relevance such as carotenoids and pharmaceutical precursors.
Example of achieved objective, co-founded by NBFC: the development of a novel toolkit for synthetic biology mediated metabolic engineering of yeast, for optimizing the production of plant secondary metabolites; the isolation of yeasts from kombucha, which can be responsible of the production of metabolites beneficial for human health.
Who
Researchers involved in the project
Internal collaboration:
External collaborations:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s NextGenerationEU NBFC – CN_00000033 – CUP: H43C22000530001
