Band 72, Heft 7 - Special Issue: Biological Engineering

Biological engineering is a new engineering discipline that is paving the way for new products and processes based on findings from biology. These allow for environmentally friendly production, use and disposal while at the same time creating high added value. Like any engineering discipline, biological engineering requires a sound university education, which is already being provided at many North American universities. The aim of the article is to motivate policymakers to take note of this development and to establish comparable departments and degree programs in the EU.

The world economy’s growth has devastated the environment, risking resource scarcity. Recognizing the urgency, various business concepts aim for triple bottom line goals – ecological, economic, and social. Biological engineering emerges as a promising solution, utilizing renewable biological resources to address global challenges. This paper explores its role across sectors like novel materials and agriculture, shifting focus to economic implications, especially in startup ventures. By examining global startups’ distribution and venture capital investments, it highlights their role in driving innovation and economic growth. It underscores biological engineering’s potential in addressing environmental challenges and fostering prosperity through innovative startups, bridging science and business for sustainability.

The increasing global population, combined with the impacts of climate change, underscores the urgent need for novel food production systems. Conventional field-based agriculture strains planetary boundaries. Vertical farming (VF) emerges as a promising alternative. It enables precise manipulation of growth factors, including light, temperature, humidity, and nutrient delivery, leading to higher yields and superior crop quality while reducing the environmental impact. Automation and robotics will enhance efficiency, while hydroponic techniques minimize fertilizer usage. Collaborative efforts are essential to address challenges such as energy consumption and technology costs to fully realize the potential of VF. Vertical farming aligns with many of the Global Sustainability Goals, offering a pathway towards food security challenges while fostering sustainability.

Microalgae, small single or multicellular photosynthetic active organisms, could be a component to solve our urgent global challenges. This review provides a concise introduction to biology and applications of microalgae. On an example from our own scientific studies, we illustrate how these organisms could replace respectively optimize carbon producing processes. We will also describe the potential of microalgae for sustainable production towards atmospheric CO 2 sequestration. Development of machine learning techniques forecast a paradigm shift regarding scientific methods. It concerns synthetic biology as well as engineering of metabolism in microalgae.

Molecular hydrogen (H 2 ) is a potent fuel and required for many industrial synthetic processes. To date, its large-scale production is highly energy-intensive and mostly based on fossil fuels. Biological H 2 generation is widespread in nature and could alleviate many of the impacts associated with current H 2 technologies. Several species of microalgae and cyanobacteria can produce H 2 employing the process of photosynthesis, that is, they use light as the energy-source, and obtain the required electrons from water. Large-scale H 2 production by algae requires specialized fermenters whose design needs expertise both in biology and process engineering. Cell-free or electrode systems employing the natural biocatalysts could be employed alternatively. Because H 2 converting biocatalysts are specialized proteins mostly sensitive towards air, the implementation of cell-free systems on a large scale requires manufacturing and processing pipelines different from existing enzyme technologies.

This article presents an overview of the evolution, impact, and challenges of plastics, focusing on the difficulties in recycling processes and introducing biocatalytic technologies as a promising solution for efficient plastic degradation. While there are many obstacles in accessability of plastics for enzymatic degradation, recent achievements in industrial application and discoveries of new enzyme classes for polymer degradation highly encourage further investment in this technology paving the way towards broad industrial application of biocatalysis in plastic recycling.

Biological engineering is enabling disruptive innovations in biopharmaceutical research, in the bio-based and sustainable production of chemicals, in decarbonization, energy production, or bioremediation. Recently, the transfer of technologies from biological engineering and synthetic biology to materials sciences established the concept of engineered living materials (ELMs). ELMs are defined as materials composed of living cells that form or assemble the material itself or modulate the functional performance of the material. ELMs enable the sustainable production of materials as well as the design of novel material properties and functions that have so far been beyond the realm of technical materials. In this contribution, we give an overview of how ELMs can offer innovative and sustainable solutions to overcome current boundaries in materials science.

The generation of human tissue through tissue engineering has been pursued for decades and is still associated with major challenges. The comparison between natural tissue formation and engineering concepts helps to understand the fabrication-assembly challenge of tissue components and provides approaches to solutions for this multidisciplinary field.

Biofabrication is a biomedical key technology for the cultivation of living tissue structures. Here, living cells are embedded in a hydrogel matrix and joined using various processes (e.g. 3D-bioprinting) to form a multicellular construct. The so formed tissue precursor then undergoes a growth process lasting several weeks in bioreactors in order to mature into living tissue. The development of today’s biofabrication processes was originally motivated by clinical needs in the field of regenerative medicine. In this context, the focus is on the cultivation of tissue or organ parts for the regeneration of affected patients. Due to the increasing maturity of the technology and its excellent scaling potential, the range of applications has expanded to other markets, such as the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and chemical industries (e.g. in-vitro tissue models) or the field of cellular agriculture (e.g. cultured meat). Engineered living materials represent another particularly new and fast-growing field of application. The following article shows how the technology has developed from the demands of regenerative medicine (market pull) and is now pushing into completely new markets on this basis (technology push). It provides an comprehensive overview of the development of the technology and the wide range of its current fields of application.

Natural materials exhibit unique properties from the molecular to the macro scale. Utilizing biological engineering approaches, they can act as a blueprint for novel and sustainable solutions in material science and technology. This paper focuses on spider silks, exemplifying a high-performance biopolymeric fibrous material with exceptional mechanical properties, high biocompatibility, slow biodegradation, low immunogenicity, and, in some cases, microbe-repellent features. In-depth understanding of the molecular structure-function relationship has facilitated the development of engineered recombinant silk proteins. In combination with biomimetic processing, they can be used for technical as well as biomedical applications.

Synthetic elements made entirely of RNA are suitable as regulatory elements in genetically modified systems and as biosensors. Such RNA aptamers are highly structured nucleotide sequences capable of specifically binding a target molecule. De novo selection of aptamers against a wide variety of potential targets is possible. By integrating RNA aptamers as binding domains into natural or synthetically designed regulatory circuits in the form of so-called riboswitches, new regulatory mechanisms can be generated that do not require additional regulatory elements. In addition, these binding domains can be used in cell-free systems to perform highly specific and affine molecular detection assays. By presenting two well-established aptamer designs, we aim to demonstrate the potential of RNA aptamer-based riboswitches and biosensors in various applications.

With the increasing loss of insect species, their ecosystem services such as pollination of plants and pest control are also under threat. This means that more intense monitoring is needed, but this poses many challenges: Collecting is comparatively easy and carried out at many locations worldwide using standardized methods such as Malaise traps that preserve the specimens in ethanol. However, a comprehensive, systematic evaluation of these samples at the specimen-level is not yet possible due to the large number of specimens and the lack of taxonomic experts who can identify the specimens to species level. We thus here present a new mini-gripper for the automated handling of insects preserved in ethanol. The mini-gripper automatically picks insects from bulk samples as long as they are in the 7.5 mm–15 mm size range to be transferred to the DiversityScanner, where they are classified using a trained AI model. This automated approach is currently tested in an EU project to identify new invasive pests.

Research into sustainable construction is increasingly focusing on the use of renewable materials in construction. These materials represent a promising alternative to conventional building materials as they are derived from renewable sources and are usually more environmentally friendly in terms of production, transport and end-of-life treatment. The Department of Ecological Building Technologies at the Vienna University of Technology has been investigating the hygrothermal behaviour and applicability of renewable materials for many years. Not only traditional building materials such as straw, wood, sheep’s wool and hemp have been investigated, but also innovative materials such as mushroom fabric. The research covered various aspects such as moisture protection, fire protection, thermal insulation, durability and resistance to external influences. The overall aim was to deepen the understanding of ecological building materials, overcome barriers to their use, and develop damage-tolerant constructions from them. The robust properties of wheat straw, sheep’s wool, hemp, cellulose and other materials underline their potential as efficient and environmentally friendly building materials. The data and insights gained will not only help to prove the effectiveness of these materials in the construction industry, but also to address concerns and uncertainties about their functionality.

In the coming decades, the use of finite and ever-scarcer primary materials will become more and more difficult, and especially more expensive. In the EU Taxonomy, the European Union stipulates that, in order to benefit from public funding, buildings must reduce their primary-materials footprint by 50 % by the year 2030 and even by 75 % by the year 2050. The intention is to replace these sources of primary raw materials with so-called secondary materials, especially with renewable raw materials. However, because land within the EU is already being used very intensively for forestry and food production, increasing scrutiny is falling on other fields involving production independent of location using organic waste materials and fungi to grow new types of building materials. This type of growth requires few resources and can take place without use of land in existing, repurposed facilities of all kinds, such as old industrial buildings or infrastructure facilities like mining shafts.

The growing need for cities to adapt to anthropogenic climate change has ushered into a new paradigm where architecture synergistically meets nature. Façade greening may help to take over multifunctional ecosystem services that impact on city residents’ well-being as well as on building energy budget. In recent studies on façade greenings, we demonstrated a cooling effect in summer, an insulation effect in winter and a Nitrogen dioxide absorption potential. Introducing this knowledge into school by offering project days led to longer-term changes in students’ knowledge, but not in their environmental attitudes. The latter will probably require constant reminders such as a series of project days focusing on environmental issues, bioengineering solutions and personal adaptation strategies.