Top-class equipment brings in international projects

“Systems biology” is in the process of taking off in Trondheim and at international level, and what is special this time is that Norwegian scientists are not belatedly linking up with European research, but hold a key position right from the start.

An imposing infrastructure has been built up in the course of the past ten years inside the buildings occupied by SINTEF Materials and Chemistry. Stimulated by the demanding requirements of Norwegian industry, NOK 6 – 8 million has been invested in robots and a total of NOK 18 million in laboratory equipment. Today, the equipment and laboratories are unique on both Norwegian and European levels.

Upgrading over the years

Micro-organisms are used, among other things, to produce medicines and chemicals worth millions of kroner, as well as to support the development of a strong industrial cluster. SINTEF’s Department of Biotechnology has almost thirty years of experience of using bacteria in production processes.

Around 1990 there were four 10-litre bioreactors or fermenters in this department – in addition to a pilot plant with two large 300-litre and 1500-litre tanks. In the mid-90s, 32 new three-litre fermenters were added. “These were soon in full production”, says research scientist Håvard Sletta. “In fact, every year we run somewhere between 500 and 1000 fermentations with our equipment”.

As well as upgrading the fermentation side, the group has also built up a screening laboratory in which bacteria are cultivated on microlitre scale in order to test tens of thousands of strains of bacteria a year. While scientists once used toothpicks to manually pick out hundreds of bacterial cultures, work of this sort is done nowadays by robots, which can pick as many as 10,000 colonies a day and transfer them to the appropriate trays for recultivation and analysis.

“Selecting and cultivating good strains of bacteria plays an important role in our work”, says Sletta. We acquired our first robot in 2000, and we currently have three of them in the screening laboratory; picking out colonies, pipetting and diluting thousands of small sample cultures.

The analytical laboratory too is as good as complete, being equipped with mass spectrometers to analyse the bacterial samples. Everything is done efficiently and is quality-assured with the aid of the modern equipment. A new NOK 5 million investment programme is just round the corner.

Genetics and modelling

For the past few years, the group has been working on genetics, as a result of its desire for better control of the processes involved. In this area, the competence of the NTNU side is making a strong contribution.

At this point in time, the group is taking the next step, and starting research on systems biology, where the scientists’ aim is to develop mathematical models of living organisms. Among the strengths of the Norwegian group are cultivation and analysis, which have brought it into projects financed via ERA-Net, a cooperative venture that involves research councils in several countries.

“This is interesting for us”, says Sletta. “By drawing on the competence of our European partners, we can develop models that tell us how we need to change the bacteria or their conditions of cultivation in order to improve production. Our aim is that our models should be capable of predicting optimal conditions, thus enabling us to cut down on the number of test trials.

“Now we are beginning to harvest the fruits of upgrading our equipment. We are currently running a number of large projects in the laboratory today, we are generating new projects, and now we are also a member of European projects. With the new network, we can do things that we would not have able to manage otherwise”, says Håvard Sletta