Biosustainablility is an important goal for humanity as it addresses many global challenges we face. Solving biosustainability challenges and achieving the ambitious targets set out with the Paris Climate Agreement and the Green Deal can only be achieved by the convergence of different technologies and domains. As outlined in a recent OECD report “Digitalisation in the bioeconomy: Convergence for the bio-based industries”, combination of digitalisation and biotechnology provides a powerful opportunity to tackle challenges of biosustainability. Specifically, integration of automated genome engineering, phenotype screening, high-throughput analytics, and informatics for generation and analysis of big data represents a paradigm shift – biology becomes a data-driven engineering discipline aiming to design disruptive biomanufacturing solutions.
Estonian Centre for Biosustainability (ECB) was established in 2016 at the University of Tartu (UT) within the ERA Chair projects SynBioTEC and GasFermTEC (https://gasfermtech.ee/) to consolidate the local expertise and create a synergistic platform for advancing synthetic biology for developing sustainable biomanufacturing processes to address global challenges in biosustainability. The strong consortium of research laboratories from UT and Tallinn University of Technology (TALTECH) are supported with several excellent core facilities, leading to both cutting-edge fundamental science and application-driven collaboration with industry. The scientific excellence of the 14 member groups of ECB has been built on highly competitive grants such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), The Wellcome Trust (UK), H2020 projects (ERC, ERA Chairs), and Centres of Excellence covering the vast majority of bioscience competence in Estonia.
The state-of-the-art research laboratories of ECB focus on both fundamental and applied research within a wide spectrum of research areas: micro, molecular, plant, synthetic, and systems biology, virology, fermentation, food biotechnology, cell-free bioengineering, drug design, robotics, material sciences, and machine learning and bioinformatics (see Team for ECB groups). ECB consolidates these complimentary focus areas towards sustainable biomanufacturing. EB research activities are further strengthened by the five core facilities at UT: i) Cell technologies; ii) Proteomics and metabolomics; iii) Wood chemistry and bioprocessing; iv) Microbiology; v) Sequencing.
ECB research groups actively collaborate with leading industries (e.g. Fibenol, LanzaTech, CH-Polymers, Chr. Hansen) to translate academic research into real-life applications through advancing industry R&D. ECB also actively contributes to the preparation of the new generation of scientists and engineers for working in biotech through the established international Bioengineering curricula at UT.
In 2023, a consortium led by UT received €30 million from the European Commission and the Estonian state to upgrade ECB to a hub of digital biology. The project DigiBio will focus on combining synthetic biology with digital technologies to facilitate big data-driven design of cells for the bio-industry, boosting both research and the development of new businesses based on industrial biotechnology. The upgrade will be achieved within the Teaming framework cooperation with the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark and TALTECH.