Project description
Digitalisation to boost bio sustainability
Bio-sustainability plays a crucial role in attaining sustainability across diverse industries and sectors, offering the potential for significant innovations and breakthroughs. Despite the substantial expansion of biotechnology and the accumulation of vast amounts of novel biological information, innovators and researchers encounter challenges in effectively managing and using this data. To address these challenges, the EU-funded DIGIBIO project strives to enhance bio-sustainability by integrating digitalisation into data management and utilisation processes. This integration is envisioned to lead to substantial advancements while minimising the time and effort required. The project's core objective involves the creation of a research and technology platform, alongside the facilitation of collaboration among three European universities focused on bio-sustainability.
Objective
Biosustainablility is an important goal for humanity as it addresses many global challenges we face. We need convergence of different technologies and domains to tackle challenges of biosustainability and combination of digitalisation and biotechnology provides a powerful opportunity for this. While engineering of biology has delivered sustainable products, high-throughput generation of biological data has outpaced our capacity to learn from it. Digitalisation of biology, however, through exhaustive analysis of big data using integrated informatics approaches promises to deliver next-generation bioengineering solutions towards a green economy. These range from healthcare to biomaterials, new foods, and sustainable energy. To foster digitalisation of biology, we propose a Teaming partnership between the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the Estonian Centre for Biosustainability (ECB), that links leading universities of Estonia: University of Tartu and Tallinn University of Technology. The DigiBio project will significantly upgrade the ECB and will create a research and technology platform for data-driven disruptive bioengineering solutions to accelerate translation of science to manufacturing of next-generation bioproducts. The platform relies on complementary actions of partners for the generation and analysis of big data through integration of automated genome engineering, phenotype screening, high-throughput analytics, and informatics. It combines knowledge- and tech-transfer of a unique concept for digitalisation of biology and personnel training developed by DTU to ECB, a bioengineering hub of Estonia, and the success story of IT commercialisation and competence of Estonia. The project is aligned with the Focus and Smart Specialisation areas of Estonia and aims to enhance regional development by extending the biosustainable research and industrial practices of Denmark into the Baltic region.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energy
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencebig data
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterials
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicssustainable economy
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsgenomes
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
51005 Tartu
Estonia