By res

Participation in the EU's research framework programmes has been open to Switzerland's scientists since 1992. Since 1st January 2004 they are now also able to co-ordinate such projects, as Switzerland is a fully-fledged associate member of the European Union's current Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Development (2002-2006). One possibility of participation are the so-called pathfinder projects, with which the EU addresses tomorrow's subjects of research.

"In collaboration with European colleagues, one searches for the path leading to–as yet, only dimly visible through the haze–the new sciences and technologies of tomorrow," muses process engineer, Professor Sven Panke. And Swiss scientists can now fully take part. The necessary funding comes directly from Brussels and no longer from Berne. Full participation means that Swiss teams can also take over the co-ordination of research projects.

The "Eurobiosyn" team (from left): Matthias Heinemann, Sven Panke, Anne Kümmel and Michael Schümperli. large

The first such project to be co-ordinated in Switzerland is the EU project "EUROBIOSYN", part of the pathfinder "Synthetic Biology", and it will be carried out under the leadership and guidance of the team around Professor Panke and Dr. Matthias Heinemann from the Bioprocess Laboratory at ETH's Institute of Process Engineering in Zurich (1). The team also includes two PhD students, Anne Kümmel and Michael Schümperli.

Combination of approaches

Researchers at the Bioprocess Laboratory at the Institute of Process Engineering work on the development of integrated bioprocessors. Integrated, in this case, means a combination of a variety of process options, on the one hand, and the integration of various scientific disciplines on the other. The latter include, for example, process technology, molecular and systems biology–also in synthetic biology. Matthias Heinemann explains this using a simple example, "Let's suppose a car is a biological cell. A system biologist would investigate this natural object, "car", analyse results of the investigation and discover that there is a motor in the car that, via the gearbox, causes the wheels to rotate. Using molecular biological knowledge, a synthetic biologist would now optimise, standardise, draw up a graph of characteristics and then combine all this to build something new and different, a spaceship for instance. So the crux of the matter is to make biological knowledge available and applicable so that it can be put to new uses. And this is precisely where the strengths of engineering science lie."

The arrangement

Each partner in the Eurobiosyn project is now working on a different part of the whole. These parts will then be used as the building blocks of a cell-based "chemical factory" in Zurich. Matthias Heinemann: "Eventually, using a simple primary substance (dextrose) this factory will be able to produce, on a potentially big scale, pharmaceutically effective glucose structures, whose classical-chemical synthesis would be economically viable. The Madrilenes help us to tweak the cellular proteome–the equipment of our factory–so that only our target molecules are produced. The team in Stuttgart are taking care of the dynamic molecular models of the enzymes–the factory's machinery–to synchronise their behaviour. Help with mathematical analysis is being provided by the team in Copenhagen. We initiated the idea and are building the factory." This means the first part, the first module. "In time we want to extend this strictly rational approach, piece for piece, module for module," say Panke and Heinemann, looking into the future.