Towards fermentation of galacturonic acid-containing feedstocks with Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The ambition to reduce our current dependence on fossil transportation fuels has driven renewed interest in bioethanol. Pectin-rich feedstocks like sugar beet pulp and citrus peel, which are currently sold as cattle feed, are promising raw materials for the production of bioethanol. This thesis explores the challenges related to the fermentation...

Social Responsibility in Research Practice: Engaging applied scientists with the socio-ethical context of their work

How to encourage researchers to critically reflect on the ethical and social dimensions of their work? That is the central research question of this thesis. It starts from the assumption that the neutrality view of the social responsibility of the researcher – the view that researchers have no business with the social and ethical dimensions of...

Quantitative analysis of relationships between fluxome and metabolome in Escherichia coli

Kinetic models, which predict the behaviour of metabolic reaction networks under different conditions, are indispensible to fully and quantitatively understand the relation between a product pathway and connected central metabolism. In this thesis the focus was to develop tools for future in vivo kinetic modeling in Escherichia coli. The...

Managing complexity of cellular systems: Theoretical tools for dynamic modeling of metabolic reaction networks

The study on biological systems attracts more and more interest since these systems offer interesting solutions to problems in diverse areas ranging from sustainable production of chemicals and fuels, environmental problems to medical questions. This thesis is concerned with the effort of improving our current understanding on how the cellular...

Involvement of Vacuolar Sequestration and Active Transport in Tolerance of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to Hop Iso-?-Acids

The hop plant, Humulus lupulus L., has an exceptionally high content of secondary metabolites, the hop -acids, which possess a range of beneficial properties, including antiseptic action. Studies performed on the mode of action of hop iso--acids have hitherto been restricted to lactic acid bacteria. The present study investigated molecular...

Mixing and In situ product removal in micro-bioreactors

Summary Of the thesis :’ Mixing and In-situ product removal in micro bioreactors’ by Xiaonan Li The work presented in this thesis is a part of a large cluster project, which was formed between DSM, Organon, Applikon and two university groups (TU Delft and University of Twente), under the ACTS and IBOS program. The aim of this cluster project was...

Dethiobacter alkaliphilus gen. nov. sp. nov., and Desulfurivibrio alkaliphilus gen. nov. sp. nov.: Two novel representatives of reductive sulfur cycle from soda lakes

Anaerobic enrichments with H2 as electron donor and thiosulfate/polysulfide as electron acceptor at pH 10 and 0.6 M total Na+ yielded two non sulfate-reducing representatives of reductive sulfur cycle from soda lake sediments. Strain AHT 1 was isolated with thiosulfate as the electron acceptor from north–eastern Mongolian soda lakes and strain...

Influence of salts and pH on growth and activity of a novel facultatively alkaliphilic, extremely salt-tolerant, obligately chemolithoautotrophic sufur-oxidizing Gammaproteobacterium Thioalkalibacter halophilus gen. nov., sp. nov. from South-Western Siberian soda lakes

A chemolithoautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing bacterium (SOB) strain ALCO 1 capable of growing at both near-neutral and extremely alkaline pH was isolated from hypersaline soda lakes in S-W Siberia (Altai, Russia). Strain ALCO 1 represents a novel separate branch within the halothiobacilli in the Gammaproteobacteria, which, so far, contained only...