IBISBA-NLIndustrial Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology Accelerator - Dutch Node

IBISBA aims to bridge a gap in industrial biotechnology by constructing a continuum between academic research and industry, translating industrial and socioeconomic constraints into scientific and technical questions that can be integrated into early stage biocatalyst design and bioprocess
development. This is particularly important with the adoption of Synthetic Biology workflows and concepts, which, owing to their truly transformative and innovative nature, have the potential to radically boost Industrial Biotechnology. In doing so, IBISBA tightly links excellent science to concrete industrial applications and, as an enabling infrastructure, it will thus provide a major contribution to industrial biotechnology, substantially accelerating the translation of knowledge into industrially-useful processes and reducing time to market. IBISBA (www.ibisba.EU) is part of the ESFRI roadmap and is currently in its preparatory phase.
IBISBA assembles a group of European infrastructures that are renowned for their excellence in industrial biotechnology and synthetic biology. These infrastructures are either already be operating in their national context as open access infrastructures (such as the Dutch Bioprocess Pilot Facility, www.bpf.eu/ or Algaeparc, www.algaeparc.com) or, in some cases, are emerging infrastructures that will benefit from inclusion in IBISBA becoming open access infrastructures during the lifetime of the project. The IBISBA-NL node focuses on the provision of scientific services revolving around biocatalyst development and the Design-Build-Test-Learn(-scale-Up) cycle (DBTL-U), which is a systematic, engineering approach that resorts heavily on synthetic biology (eg. www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0076-9).
IBISBA is composed of a series of technology platforms that underpin R&D in biosciences and notably directed towards the creation of biological objects, including engineered enzymes and enzyme assemblies, microbial strains, and other platforms that allow the translation of bioscience research into bioprocess development. Regarding the former, platforms will cover enzyme screening and advanced engineering platforms, cutting edge omics facilities for understanding life systems, automated microbial strain construction and genetic circuit assembly, bioprospecting workflows, high-throughput analytics, and laboratory evolution. These biocatalyst construction facilities will be completed by other facilities for early bioprocess development, including micro and mini fermentation systems and larger bioreactors and downstream separation and purification equipment for bioprocess development across TRL4-6. The infrastructure’s hardware will be connected using advanced ICT, including a ScienceCloud that will offer the necessary database hosting capacity and supply the means to implement business process management strategies for the operation of complex multi-stage industrial biotechnology projects characterized by design-build-test iterations. Typical R&D actions that will be developed by the infrastructure will be:
1. Development of tools to interface heterogeneous knowledge arising from different steps in the R&D process, wit focus on DBTL(U) cycles. This action will no doubt require database interfacing
2. Modelling-driven design and to describe process constraints in terms of scientific criteria that can be used to better orientate earlier stage biocatalyst development
3. Acceleration of critical R&D processes to achieve medium/high-throughput across the R&D process using automatization to overcome bottlenecks. Actions include Design-Build-Test-Learn to accelerate biocatalysts and process development or improved downsized fermentation technology to accelerate the selection of industrially-relevant microbial strains."