Introduction

In this lecture Sef Heijnen will teach you about the great opportunities that microorganisms provide us with. He will show you what microorganisms need and how to quantify what they consume and produce. For those of you for whom biotechnology is new, this might be challenging. Therefore you can find a terminology list, a formula list and a symbol list in the Readings page.

Sef will also elaborate on some so called “bananas”. These are pitfalls that students tend to make when working with balances.

In the Best Practice, prof. Mark van Loosdrecht introduces the power of nature: how to use microorganisms in open cultures for turning waste into useful materials. Instead of engineering a single microorganism, he introduces the engineering of a microbial community.