April 17th, 2015

Schiller's team is using tailor-made proteins as building blocks to assemble nanosystems with new physical, chemical, and biological properties. The sustainable and resource-conserving production of these proteins occurs in processes like the natural energy and material cycle of cells. To this end, the team is working on equipping bacteria with additional elements - such as enzymes, transporters, switches, and organelles, the organs of the cell. In the future, the scientists hope that these elements will extend the range of functions of the cell to enable the sustainable production of the desired nanosystems with a minimum of resources. The same principle could also be used to produce basic raw materials for the chemical industry. "Methods like this are indispensable for the successful transition of our economy to a sustainable and resilient bioeconomy," says Schiller.
Stefan Schiller is a research group head at the Freiburg Center for Systems Biology (ZBSA) and a member of the Cluster of Excellence BIOSS Biological Signalling Studies of the University of Freiburg. The research was conducted in cooperation with scientists from the University of Constance. The project is receiving funding from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation within the context of the research network "Functional Nanostructures."