Food tech and bioengineering

DigiBio project focuses on digitalisation, bioeconomy, and sustainability, scientific domains which constitute a high priority in national, regional, and EU strategies and policies. As the second large European Centre within this area, the Estonian Centre for Bioesustainability (ECB) will place Estonia in a very competitive position in European R&I. With DTU assistance, ECB will establish a major research, technology development, and innovation platform for the generation of cutting-edge bioengineering solutions focused on sustainable bio-production through biology digitalisation. This platform will accelerate lab-to-market translation of bioengineering solutions, diversifying Estonian national industry. DigiBio’s overarching objective is to establish a state-of-the-art CoE for digitalisation of biology in Estonia, through upgrading the ECB.

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) are the only short-term alternative to fossil fuels in aviation. Considering the increased number of passengers forecasted in the near future, a massive increased in SAF production has been estimated in the years to come. To fulfill this increase in demand, the combination of existing and new renewable production chains is needed. Current SAF-producing pathways are at different levels of maturity, implementation or even commercialization. However, lowering the cost and supply chain development are key challenges for commercial-scale SAF deployment. Using biowastes as feedstock for SAF is challenging but necessary to make SAF competitive with fossil fuels. In this context, yeasts may be key players to generate economically-viable SAF intermediates (terpenes or fatty acids (FA)) in an environmentally-friendly way from biowaste. This SAF production by biological means is very new and presents a lot of remaining challenges and training gaps that have to be addressed. YAF research programme aims at; i) producing carbon sources from biowastes, ii) developing new yeast cell factories to produce SAF, iii) designing new bifunctional catalysts, iv) achieving efficient strategies for FA/terpenes extraction, and v) creating robust framework tailored to the scaling-up methodologies and life-cycle sustainability assessment of different SAF producing routes, which will support decisionmaking. To achieve this, the right integration of biology, biotechnology, chemical engineering and environmental sciences will be required. Thus, the prime training/networking aim of YAF is to train the next generation of researchers in a highly interdisciplinary and intersectorial research environment such that they can soundly address upcoming challenges concerning production yeastbased SAF. YAF has been designed to strengthen European research and innovation, enhancing research visibility and generating a critical mass to address European (and global) challenges

The transition towards a clean economy requires novel processes for chemical, material, and liquid fuel production that use sustainable substrates, have improved life cycle, and hence a reduced carbon footprint. Cell factories provide the ultimate platform for this purpose to drive the world economy and mitigate risks emanating from climate change. An exponential increase in process productivity by rapid technological developments in the fields of additive manufacturing and synthetic biology has the potential to influence nearly every industry because of adaptability and continual cost reduction. In this project, we offer interdisciplinary research that combines the advances in additive manufacturing of living materials with synthetic biology of non-conventional yeasts to manufacture a novel flow chemistry platform for creating biorefineries that can convert sustainable, locally available substrates into value-added oleochemicals with an aim to meet sustainability goals of society.