Advancements in post-surgical healing are a major topic in biomedical science and require innovations in materials science. In many medical procedures, current medical glues are more efficient than traditional sutures but they still lack sufficient wet-tolerant adhesive strength. Biopolymers are naturally derived and biocompatible, and present enormous potential for applications such as tissue glue. To address the adhesive challenge, we propose GEMSilk, an innovative and interdisciplinary framework integrating analytical techniques of material science with genetically engineered silk glue. Our key objective is to develop a caddisfly-derived and inherently wet-tolerant aquatic silk glue recombinant protein expression system in the domestic silkworm (Bombyx mori). Utilising CRISPR/Cas9, caddisfly aquatic silk glue DNA motifs will be inserted into the silkworm's silk gene, the resulting stable mutant lines will produce commercial quantities of wet-tolerant silk glue. By training through research and a secondment at the lab of supervisor Seib’s collaborator, I will gain essential, state-of-the-art skills in novel silk biopolymer design and silk analysis. Moreover, the silk glue product will undergo intellectual property evaluations with Seib, further augmenting my professional skill set with this essential process and the potentials beyond GEMSilk will also be assessed. During GEMSilk, I will gain substantial and rigorous training in silk analysis and essential assays for silks based healthcare. I will be located at Fraunhofer-IME's new world-class multi-disciplinary applied insect biotechnology research institute. Over the past months, Seib and I have honed GEMSilk. Combining Seib’s profound experience in silk analysis for healthcare with my skills in silkworm genetic engineering, not only promises to elevate my career through advanced training and project management but also to develop a game-changing silk-based product for biomedical applications.

The combination of biomass valorisation, process intensification and green technology is an attractive research challenge for the European Community being in line with the “Resource-efficient Europe” flagship initiatives by optimizing the use of material, energy resources and gaining valuable products with lower impact on our environment and health. The AMICREX project accepts this challenge and aims to develop an integrated process design for future industrial implementation, where by-products from agro industrial processes (e.g. carrot peels) can be valorised by recovering high- value nonpolar components (e.g. carotenoids, well recognized natural pigments and widely used in the food and cosmetic industries) through a microwave intensified microemulsion extraction process. The AMICREX concept can be extended to address the challenges proposed by extraction of nonpolar metabolites, especially carotenoids, from other renewable biomass sources (e.g. Microalgae). The key aspects of the proposed technology are 1) avoid the use of hazardous organic solvents in nonpolar compounds’ extraction by using microemulsion as extraction media, and 2) improve extraction kinetics by microwave cell disruption method in order to liberate intracellular compounds and make them available for the subsequent extraction process. The research will first focus on the evaluation on the laboratory scale microwave cell disruption and subsequent microemulsion extraction processes of the characterized biomass. Based on the so obtained process and system specifications the small scale process is aimed to be turned into an industrial design concept through process modeling and simulation. The satisfactory implementation of the project will be achieved by filling the gap between multidisciplinary fields of natural sciences and engineering. Moreover, the interdisciplinary scenario between biomass cell disruption, extraction process and microemulsion technology will be established.

The ever-increasing capacity demand in optical fiber communications is currently being addressed in three ways: a) Increasing the data rate carried by each wavelength channel in wavelength-division multi¬plexed (WDM) systems by using advanced optical modulation formats which offer improved spectral efficiency compared to legacy On-Off Keyed formats, b) reducing the unused bandwidth between channels by precisely controlling the transmitter wavelength and channel spacing, and c) using flexible transmission techniques to tailor the optical channels to the traffic demands in real time. A key component that enables all three of these techniques to be addressed is a low-linewidth optical comb source. The low-linewidth allows the high-order modulation formats to be used. The comb line spacing is precisely controlled so that adjacent channels will not “wander” independently and interfere with each other. The spacing between the lines can also be controlled to change the channel separation in order to allow different modulation formats and especially different symbol rates for the individual sub-channels. This allows the system to adapt to optimize the bit rate and/or modulation format depending on the available bandwidth and properties (dispersion, noise, loss, etc.) of the transmission link. For this adaptation, enhanced digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms are used. The goal of this project is to investigate high-capacity, cost effective, flexible WDM transmission systems, employing optical frequency combs and enhanced DSP technologies.