The problem:

​

New biotechnological production processes are needed to produce proteins, peptides or nucleic acids for sustainable nutrition, health-care or consumer-care markets. Optimization of existing production processes is needed to stay competitive in global markets for small molecules e.g. amino acids. But development or optimization of microbial production strains is challenging, time-consuming and risky, because it is necessary to overcome current knowledge, to identify so far unknown potential, to confirm new findings and to implement them in commercial production processes. 

​

Our solution:

​

We invented, patented and successfully apply a novel strain development technology, enabling strain-construction and -optimization in a way and at a speed, that was impossible before.

​

Using our novel strain development technology, we develop powerful and versatile production platforms for small molecules, proteins & peptides, and nucleic acids. These platforms are quickly adaptable to a huge number of individual products for different markets.

​

Our technology in detail:

​

Our novel strain development technology is based on single-cell biosensors, which detect a product of interest at molecular level and transform its concentration into graded optical signals. These signals represent a phenotype for productivity, enabling optical analysis of huge cell-libraries with literally unlimited throughput in short time. Imagine to screen libraries with millions of variants within hours, imagine to analyse each single mutant from undirected mutagenesis experiments, each target-variant emerging from saturation- or error-prone mutagenesis, each entity in a metagenome-library, hundreds of millions of strains in natural evolution cycles... The SenseUp Metasensor-Technology enables all of that, providing strong advantages for microbial strain-development. These are:

​

Accessing full biotechnological potential:

Screening of complete libraries gives access to their full biotechnological potential, not only to fractions of it. We identify the best strain, enzyme-variant or new biocatalyst out of billions instead of thousands.
 

Natural evolution:

The unlimited throughput enables natural evolution approaches. We can easily wait for the one cell under millions which accidently gained a beneficial mutation. There is no limitation to knowledge-based synthetic biology actions or brutal undirected mutagenesis steps. We just let nature do its job to accidently find elegant solutions for a given task.
 

Screening from process conditions:

Screening and selection on single-cell level enables joint cultivation of billions of clones in one vessel in any scale. By that, we mimic industrial fermentation conditions as close as possible and screen from these conditions: "You get what you screen for" is a well known fact, thus screening from process-conditions gives you the strains performing best under even these industrially relevant conditions.

​

​

​