Microbial robustness in bioprocesses

Conference poster, 2023

Yeast is broadly exploited for industrial use, and strains are constantly improved to meet the requirements to produce the targeted product with high yield, productivity and titer. Successful strains have consistent performance also in presence of different perturbations, i.e. their performance is robust. The concept of microbial robustness will be discussed and contrasted to tolerance toward specific stresses. Furthermore, a method to quantitatively assess microbial robustness will be presented. This method allows a high throughput evaluation, in a perturbation space where different cellular function can form the basis for the evaluation. Another important tool box to examine intracellular status in face of pertubations are biosensors. Examples of applying these two methodologies towards microbial robustness will be discussed. We have used the tools to scale down bioprocesses and their perturbation, to follow adaptive laboratory evolution and to gain understanding of subpopulations.