Our research focuses on the model microorganisms Gluconobacter oxydans and Corynebacterium glutamicum.
G. oxydans is an acetic acid bacterium and used for the conversion of renewable carbon sources to industrially important chemicals by regioselective and stereoselective periplasmatic oxidations of sugars, sugar alcohols, sugar acids, alcohols and other substrates. Strains of C. glutamicum are used in industrial biotechnology for amino acid production and are continuously improved using metabolic engineering approaches including new methods such as metabolite sensors, new biosynthesis pathways, and access to alternative carbon sources.
We use Next Generation Sequencing (Illumina), DNA microarrays, LC/MS- based proteomics and further methods to study and analyse wild-type, mutagenized and engineered strains. NGS is used to analyse genomic structural variances and SNPs to check for genome stability and suppressor mutations. NGS and DNA microarrays are also used to analyse global gene expression and changes thereof including the study of small non-coding RNAs. The analysis of global gene expression in combination with LC/MS-based proteomics is applied for characterisation and analysis of engineered producer strains and whose potential bottlenecks. These methods are also used for the study of regulation including gene expression, sRNAs, and post-translational modifications. In this view, handling and analysis of all of these NGS, microarray and proteomics data are also pivotal and require application of diverse software including bioinformatics tools.