The second conference on “Synthetic Biology for Natural Products” took place from 02.-05.06.2019 in Puerto Vallarta (Mexico). This year, the focus was laid on „The Interface of (Meta)Genomics, Synthetic Biology and Natural Product Discovery“. The BioSC was represented by contributions of co-workers from the IMET (HHU Düsseldorf), who presented their research within the BioSC FocusLabs „CombiCom“ and „Bio2“ in talks and poster sessions.

On 11 June 2019, the 21st BioSC Lecture took place at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Prof. Dr. Erik Meers from the University of Ghent presented the Biorefine Cluster Europe. The Cluster networks research projects for the valorisation of residual flows from agriculture, agro- and food industry as well as biological waste and wastewater flows and supports the implementation of the results in practice.

The research group “Bioprocesses and Bioanalytics” and the Helmholtz Innovation Lab “MiBioLab” at IBG-1 received the first Labvolution Award at the LABVOLUTION trade fair in Hanover on Tuesday. The award honours ideas that improve laboratories – in this case with the creation of an automated and miniaturised cultivation platform by Prof. Marco Oldiges’ research group. This received 1st place. The Labvolution trade fair in Hanover is the most important trade fair on the subject of digitisation and automation in the laboratory sector.

On 25 April, the journal "Science" reported on a recent publication by Schwinges et al., which was published as part of the BioSC project BiFuProts. The anchor peptide technology used here was developed as part of several BioSC projects and is currently also used in the BioSC FocusLab greenRelease.

On March 13th, the 20th BioSC Lecture took place in the Jülich Research Center. Prof. Dr. Thomas Brück, holder of the Werner Siemens Chair for synthetic biotechnology and director of the AlgaeTec Center at the Technical University of Munich, presented different bioprocesses for fixation, valorization and storage of CO2.

The 10th “BIO-raffiniert” conference took place from February 26th to 27th, 2019 at Fraunhofer UMSICHT in Oberhausen. This year´s theme "New ways to use biogenic resources?", which was also the topic of the first “Bio-refined” conference in 2003, was examined from different perspectives. Two of the presentations were given by BioSC members Dr. Nina Ihling (RWTH Aachen University) and Dr. Arnd Kuhn (FZ Jülich).