The 9th International BioSC Symposium was held at the LVR Landesmuseum in Bonn on November 24 and 25, 2025. Around 150 participants from academia, industry, politics and civil society joined the event that focused on the connections and links between bioeconomy, circularity and sustainability in the context of global and climate change. Welcome addresses were given by Thorsten Menne from the Ministry of Culture and Science NRW and Katja Frühwald-König, Co-Chair of the Bioeconomy Council NRW. Thorsten Menne presented the BioSC Christian Patermann Award 2025 for exceptional supervision of PhD students in the field of bioeconomy to Jeanette Klink-Lehmann (University of Bonn) and Marco Löhrer (RWTH Aachen University).

John Woodley (DTU Chemical Engineering, Denmark) gave the 35th BioSC Lecture entitled “Opportunities and challenges for microbial and cell-free biocatalysis” at the Jülich Biotech Day 2025. In his presentation, John Woodley focused on biocatalysis and highlighted the differences between in vivo and in vitro reactions.

The 10th anniversary of the PhD Day was again held in Neuss. Scientists from industry and Doctoral Researcher came together to discuss science and how innovation is driven in industry, along case studies in the according companies. An additional well-established part of our PhD day was the insight into the respective career pathways of the speakers.

Congratulations to Uwe Conrath on his review in Nature Plants, where he comprehensively highlights the parallels between systemic resistance in plants and acquired immunity in mammals. The similarities between the two mechanisms offer considerable potential for changing both agricultural practices and medical therapies, for example with the development of innovative crop protection strategies and the optimization of vaccine approaches.

Congratulations on the paper “A Sustainable Method for Potato Side Stream Valorisation to Obtain Steroidal Glycoalkaloids within a Bioeconomy Approach“. The study shows how plant by-products can be used as a source of valuable natural substances without competing with food production, and makes an important contribution to the further development of sustainable processes in natural product chemistry.

‘The rocky path from research to commercialisation of biosurfactants’ was impressively described by Wim Soetaert in the 34th BioSC Lecture on 12 September 2025. The BioSC Lecture was also a keynote lecture at the Biosurfactants Conference 2025 at RWTH Aachen University.