VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

The research focuses on engineering and scaling up production of biological systems for sustainable, chemicals and proteins for enzyme, biomaterials, food, and pharmaceutical applications.

VTT’s state-of-the-art research and piloting facilities provide efficient genetic code design for organisms, the development of new and efficient production hosts, and scaling of production processes. The facilities enable research and innovation from the laboratory to pilot scale.

Small-scale units cover research that is required for the early stages of the workflow. Starting from the manual standard laboratory discoveries through automation-supported actions, VTT can generate and screen large amounts of organisms with genetic modifications. In practice, strains are constructed and characterized by using equipment such as our microtiter-level pipetting robots Tecan Fluent 780 and Beckman Coulter Biomek i7. The same setup can also be used to screen VTT’s proprietary strain collection for microbes with desired properties e.g. for biomass degradation or metabolite production.

Strain performance in controlled cultures can be tested using a series of instruments such as Biolector microbioreactors or ambr250 multi-parallel bioreactors (250 ml). Furthermore, strain performance can be tested in over 60 bioreactors ranging from 0.5 to 1200 liters (see below for equipment listing). Collectively, these instruments enable to evaluate fermentation performance at micro-level before taking the process to an actual bioreactor and therefore, save resources. From bioreactor cultivations large sets of data can be gathered, for example, about gas and nutrient intake, which are important when optimizing the process. VTT has also various downstream process equipment to explore different purification methods.