Projects
Industrial Biotechnology is key to maintain Europe's leading position in the global bio-based market and help the transition to a green and circular economy. Fostering investment in innovative technologies like those to be demonstrated in ROBUSTOO and supporting biotech SMEs will contribute to this endeavour. We aim to capitalise the results from previous EU projects that...
Microbial production of plant metabolites has economic & environmental benefits over traditional extraction and chemical methods. Despite initial progress & the successful market introduction of some molecules, the microbial production of oxygenated plant metabolites (OPMs) mediated by cytochrome P450 enzymes (CYPs) is still lagging, making them almost inaccessible to...
Plastics are one of the most widely used materials, with a wide variety of applications across all sectors of the economy. Its production is estimated to be around 360 million tonnes, and thus synthetic polymer is poorly biodegradable. Plastic life cycle is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change, plastic waste has been found in every...
We are devoted to the development of computational algorithms for LifeScience, using molecular modelling techniques, bioinformatics and machine learning methods.
Our molecular modeling software, PELE, is used worldwide through its public server, and commercialised through NBD since 2017, and clearly outperformed other tools in the CSAR blind...
The sustainability of plastic materials implies attaining a renewable origin and recyclable nature. Unfortunately, both conditions are far from being fulfilled by the current industry. In the polyester sector, PET [poly(ethylene- terephthalate)], one of the most common plastics, has a petrochemical origin. Happily, PEF [poly(ethylene-furandicarboxylate)] is emerging as a...
The increasing shift to eco-friendly production impacts the industry of consumer products. The EU-funded FuturEnzyme project will develop advanced innovative solutions to discover, design, optimise and formulate low-cost enzymes for economically viable products in the textile, detergent and cosmetics sectors. A textile containing Elasthane, a liquid detergent, and a...
In this project, we present PluriZymes, enzymes containing multiple (engineered) catalytic actives sites in a single scaffold, as one of the next breakthroughs in enzymatic catalysis. We show clear preliminary evidence of the potential role of PluriZymes in optimizing complex biochemical processes, such as cellulose degradation, or to group cascade reactions into one single...
Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is a rare type of cancer and the second most common hepatobiliary malignancy, accounting for 10 to 20% of primary liver cancers. In the recent years, different groups have published data on the molecular biology of CCA, describing a complex pathogenesis, involving various molecular pathways, some of them potential therapeutic targets, such as...
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are abundant in mammalian transcriptomes. However, it remains unclear how many of them are functional, and how their functions are performed. LncRNAs seem to be poorly conserved at the sequence level, but some of them share conserved structural elements and are present at syntenic genomic positions in different species.
A...
The INDOX proposal on industrial oxidoreductases aimed to provide relevant industrial case stories to demonstrate the efficacy of optimized biocatalysts on targeted reactions, and to establish the processes scalability, sustainability and cost-efficiency versus chemical conversion processes. The chemical industry (specialties excluded) is not yet embracing enzymatic oxidation...