Waste to Products with Synthetic Biology
How can biotechnological pathways help in turning various waste streams into high value products? Can biological routes be competitive?
In this webinar VTT’s Research Professor Merja Penttilä and Research Team Leader Jussi Jäntti present several case studies and discuss the benefits of biological routes of creating new products.
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Speakers
Merja Penttilä is a research professor in biotechnology at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and an adjunct professor in synthetic biology at Aalto University. Her expertise is on engineering of microbes for the production of fuels, chemicals, enzymes and materials. She has acted as the director of the Academy of Finland CoE on White biotechnology – Green chemistry, and is a PI in the current CoE on Molecular engineering of biosynthetic hybrid materials (Hyber). She has coordinated a large strategic project “Living Factories: Synthetic Biology for a sustainable Bioeconomy”, and led many EU level and industrial projects. She is acting an advisory board or committee member of a number of international organisations. She is the initiator of Synbio Powerhouse, an ecosystem to promote biotechnology and synthetic biology in Finland and beyond. She has total of 334 publications, 14 457 Web of science citations, and h-index of 70.
Jussi Jäntti leads the Production host engineering research team at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. His team develops methods for the establishment of novel enzymatic pathways and regulatory genetic circuits. A central target is to establish efficient engineering methods for industrially relevant organisms to speed up the process of Cell factory establishment for the sustainable production of chemicals and proteins.
Webinar host
Nina Pulkkis is a science journalist and documentary filmmaker. She is the creator of the award winning Future of Finland science -series and the multidicilplinary science project Korvaa. She is specialised in covering themes that include synthetic biology and biomaterials.
Mervi Toivari is a Principal Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. Her key expertise is on engineering of yeast and filamentous fungi for production of fuels and chemicals. She has over 20 years of experience in metabolic engineering, molecular biology, and cell physiology. Mervi Toivari has a PhD in Biochemistry and IPMA C certification in project management.