Check our review in Biotechnology Advances: Hidden antibiotics: Where to uncover?

The quest to find novel antibiotics is currently very difficult in a time where antimicrobial resistance is on the rise. By causing 25.000 deaths in the European Union alone, it is the sixth major death cause in the EU. In case…

New article published in Colloids and Interfaces on ‘Expression of Chimeric Cytochrome P450s’

‘Classical’ biosurfactants produced by Starmerella bombicola contain oleic acid as the incorporated hydrophobic group. However, other chain lengths can (to a certain content) be incorporated by feeding the yeast with substrates of alternative chain lengths, be it with a lower efficiency. …

Kick-off event Applisurf industry user group @ 8 October!

The AppliSurf INDUSTRY USER GROUP Kick-Off Event will be organised on 8 October 2018 at 9.30am in Ghent (Belgium). More information on this event can be found here. Registration is free but mandatory. Companies that wish to be involved in the user group can still join this VIS…

Article in ‘Soft Matter’ : Bio-based glyco-bolaamphiphile forms a temperature-responsive hydrogel with tunable elastic properties

Recently, our lab succeeded to produce bio-based glycolipid bolaamphiphile on a gram scale by using the genetically-engineered S. bombicola strain Δat Δsble Δfao1 (Van Renterghem et al., Biotechnol. Bioeng., 2018, 115, 1195–1206). This article show that the bio-based glyco-bolaamphiphile readily forms a hydrogel in water at room temperature, and that the…

A research article about bolaamphiphilic sophorolipids is published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering

Currently, there is a lot of interest in bolaamphiphiles because of the unusual architecture created by such molecules as they possess not one but two hydrophilic heads, coupled by a hydrophobic linker. Only a limited amount of bolaamhiphiles can be produced microbially.…

New article: Complex coacervation of natural sophorolipid bolaamphiphile micelles with cationic polyelectrolytes

A new article was published in the journal ‘Green Chemistry’. Herein, complex coacervation of micelles from a bolaform sophorolipid biosurfactant with oppositely charged cationic polyelectrolytes (i.e., chitosan oligosaccharide lactate, poly (L-lysine) and poly(allylamine)) was investigated. You can find the article…

New project ‘AppliSurf’ starts on the 1st of August!

On the 1st of August, a new project will start at InBio.be that focuses on expanding the functional portfolio of biosurfactants. The research partners that will contribute to this project are Ghent University (Faculty Bioscience Engineering InBio.be, Faculty Green Chemistry…