VTT Technical Research Center of Finland

 

 

VTT is a governmental impartial expert contract research organization with a staff of 3,160
and is divided into 6 knowledge clusters. The Cell Factory competence center within the
Bio and Process Technology Cluster is involved in the Marine Fungi project. VTT has a strong
focus on the use of fungi in the development of biorefinery concepts, including biodiesel, bioethanol,

chemicals and materials from renewable resources.

VTT collaborates extensively in these fields in Europe and globally with academia and industry. VTT has obtained a national Centre of Excellence status for years 2008-2013 in White Biotechnology – Green Chemistry (Dir. Prof. Merja Penttilä).

VTT has a strong focus on the physiology of yeast and filamentous fungi, with expertise in metabolic engineering as well as culture optimization and scaling up operations. High-throughput-screening has been developed for filamentous fungi. VTT has a number of national, Nordic and international projects in fungal fermentations, and is or has been a partner (e.g. Eurofung, Eurofungbase, YSBN, NILE, Biosynergy, SYSINBIO, HYPE, BioCore) or coordinator (Time, DISCO, NEMO) in various EU projects on related research. VTT has facilities for fermentation from 0.1 l to 1200 l scale and the corresponding down stream processing. Various analytical methods are available inhouse (e.g. HPLC-MS, GC-MS, GPC, liquid and solid state NMR, MALDI-TOF).

 

Role in project:

VTT leads WP8 on robust and sustainable process development, applying their strong background on the physiology of filamentous fungi. VTT is also involved in WP3 (comparative genomics) and WP4 (small scale optimization).

 

PI contact: Dr. Marilyn Wiebe  marilyn.wiebe (@) vtt.fi

 

www.vtt.fi