TU Munich — TUM School of Engin­eer­ing and Design — Pro­fess­or­ship for Sys­tems Biotechnology

The field of sys­tems bio­tech­no­logy deals with the applic­a­tion of sys­tems bio­logy meth­ods and pro­ced­ures to bio­tech­no­lo­gic­al prob­lems. In recent years, sys­tems bio­logy has estab­lished itself as an inter­dis­cip­lin­ary field of research, com­bin­ing mathematical/​theoretical approaches with exper­i­ment­al methods.

In addi­tion to the improve­ment of the over­all bio­tech­no­lo­gic­al pro­cess, the main focus of the research work is an improved under­stand­ing of the pro­cesses tak­ing place in a cell. Pseudo­mo­nas putida, Escheri­chia coli and Halomo­nas elong­ata were selec­ted as mod­el organ­isms, all of which have high poten­tial for bio­tech­no­lo­gic­al research.

The meth­od­o­lo­gic­al focus of the depart­ment is the devel­op­ment of mean­ing­ful math­em­at­ic­al mod­els, with the help of which the beha­vi­or of the cells is first described, but then also spe­cific­ally influ­enced. This requires mod­els with high pre­dict­ive poten­tial. To build and val­id­ate these mod­els, exper­i­ment­al data from dif­fer­ent cel­lu­lar levels (meta­bol­ism, gene expres­sion, and sig­nal trans­duc­tion) are merged with data from the pro­cess. For exper­i­ment­al work, the depart­ment has an S1 labor­at­ory with attached work and eval­u­ation room and a good equip­ment of ana­lyt­ic­al and meas­ure­ment devices as well as cul­tiv­a­tion facilities.