After working hard for many years, saying goodbye to an H2020 project can be hard. This is especially true if you have achieved good results when you are left wondering how to expand and exploit them further. Luckily, the project doesn’t have to end with the H2020 funding. In this post, we want to go over [...]
Antibiotics are one of the scientific innovations that changed the world back in the 20th century. However, the overuse and the misuse of antibiotics during the years have fed the emergence of multi-resistant bacteria. As a consequence, “superbug” infections are one of the most urgent threats that humankind has to fight. Since the discovery of [...]
If you crack open a TV, your laptop or your phone, you’ll see that their parts look very similar: resistances, capacitors, transistors… You could take some of these parts, use them in another device, and they would work! Although it seems natural now, this standardisation was everything but spontaneous. It took (and still takes) a [...]
The climate crisis is a pressing and complex matter that requires varied, innovative solutions: manufacturers changing the way they produce consumer goods, regulations that foster those changes, and social movements that support the shifts, to mention a few. Today we want to talk about how synthetic biology is helping with it: transforming the raw CO2 [...]
Vaccines have saved millions of lives worldwide. They banished smallpox from the face of the Earth in 1980, and other diseases like polio or malaria are going the same way. However, there are diseases that resist vaccination effects. One of these cases is Mycoplasma infections. Mycoplasma are microorganisms that, although they also infect humans, are [...]
Water bottles, food packages, supermarket bags… we all use them on our day to day and, in the vast majority, they’re all made from plastic. Just in Europe, we are consuming over 50 million tonnes of plastic each year: nearly 100 Kg of plastic for each one of us! In the face of this environmental [...]
Bread, wine and beer need yeast to ferment, and cheese and yoghurt are possible thanks to bacteria during its processing. Many species of fungus are major sources of pharmacologically active drugs, such as antibiotics like Penicillin. Microorganisms are present in a lot of products we use and food we consume in our everyday life. They [...]
