Interdisciplinary PhD projects

PhD students in BioSC Core Groups have the opportunity to apply for interdisciplinary small-scale projects with a six-month duration across different BioSC partner locations and research areas. There are one or two calls for proposals per year.

Projects 2025:

Photo: Applied Mikrobiology, RWTH Aachen Photo: Applied Mikrobiology, RWTH Aachen

With Food4Root, we strive to contribute to the development of a more sustainable agriculture, addressing the pressing need for innovative solutions to enhance crop productivity while minimizing environmental pollution. The project focuses on the development of biodegradable gel beads utilizing polyglutamic acid (polyG) and polyphosphate (polyP), two biopolymers with promising potential as nutrient delivery systems for plants. The agricultural sector heavily relies on synthetic compounds derived from fossil resources, contributing significantly to environmental contamination and posing challenges to long-term food security. Recognizing this, Food4Root seeks to replace conventional fertilizers with low efficiency due to non-specific application on agricultural land with a slow-release system based on biodegradable gel beads. By encapsulating polyphosphate in a nitrogen-containing gel matrix, these beads offer a targeted and controlled approach to nutrient delivery, ensuring optimal plant growth while minimizing wastage and environmental pollution. In an interdisciplinary approach, we aim to optimize the production processes and the properties of the beads to fine-tune their efficacy and stability depending on the requirements for plant development. Testing the effectiveness of the gel beads involves comprehensive phenotyping of plant responses based on advanced imaging and analysis techniques. Building upon previous successful experiments with slow-release fertilizers like struvite, the project aims to demonstrate the viability and superiority of the biopolymer-based approach in promoting root development and overall plant health.

Photo: Illustration of the interdisciplinary collaboration in this project. Forschungszentrum Jülich Photo: Illustration of the interdisciplinary collaboration in this project. Forschungszentrum Jülich

Microfluidic cultivation devices enable unique studies of microbial growth, physiology and production processes and in combination with live-cell imaging offer a unique solution to investigate and track the development of individual cells. While high-throughput is achieved by imaging hundreds of micrometer-sized growth chambers on a microfluidic chip, the overall throughput is strongly limited by the extent of manual workload for preparation of the experimental setup and manual image processing. Furthermore, the high acquisition costs of suitable microscopes limits the number of microfluidic setups available making even the screening of suitable experimental conditions exceed experimental resources. Thus, reducing the overall costs and manual labor is key to increase the applicability of microfluidic single-cell analysis in various bioeconomically relevant research areas, including the development and evaluation of new microbial production hosts and bioprocess engineering.

In the HAIPSs3D project, we combine our know how to apply artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted image processing for low-cost 3D-printed microscopes (3D-Mic) in order to screen photosensitizer effects. Due to the challenging imaging conditions with low-cost components, we develop real-time AI-driven image processing on digitized microfluidic chips. Genetically encoded photosensitizers (PS) with their unique ability to intracellularly form reactive oxygen species (ROS) under light irradiation, will be used as first proof of concept to evaluate and improve the 3D-printed microscope system. PS are a versatile optogenetic tool that can non-invasively be activated in the cytoplasm of living cells during microfluidic cultivation (light illumination) thereby generating an easy to detect outcome (reduced growth rate/cell death). By applying different PS in various biotechnologically relevant bacteria, the 3D-Mic will be validated in comparison to the established microscopes to elucidate if the new microfluidic platform can accelerate the development of new biotechnological production processes in near future.