Abstract
The UNLOCK facility provides a unique platform for breakthroughs in knowledge and application of mixed microbial cultures, thereby providing the means to solve some of the major societal challenges facing food safety and production, human, animal and environmental health, bio-resource utilization and sustainable production of plug-in commodity chemicals by the biotech industry. Research methods for investigation of microbial communities and their interaction with the environment develop very fast due to novel advanced molecular tools that need to be integrated with more traditional cultivation based methods. Effective dealing with the increased complexity of these experimental procedures requires a standardized research infrastructure as defined in UNLOCK. One of the major challenges defined in UNLOCK is the integration and optimization of the hard- and software side of the infrastructure. The most important threat for development of the UNLOCK platform is that the hard- and software integration, standardization, and optimization elaborated in the development phase of UNLOCK cannot be established. Also, the currently available momentum driven by the expressed expectations and needs of potential academic and industrial users would be lost at least to an important extent. The bridge funding proposed here will be distributed among three tasks, associated with the different complementary expertise of the partners involved in UNLOCK. The three core activities of UNLOCK are covered in this bridge funding proposal: (i) microbial culture cultivation and functional characterization, (ii) molecular community characterization using molecular methods, and (iii) data handling, processing & interpretation.
Netherlands