MBL wishes you all happy and fruitful new year 2026!
The Microbial Bioengineering Laboratory wishes all its members, friends, collaborators, and supporters a happy, successful, and inspiring New Year 2026!
We believe the coming year will be at least as successful as the one now ending. In 2025, our maturing laboratory achieved several important milestones and published several research articles:
We developed an initial genome-editing toolset for Caldimonas thermodepolymerans, the first model thermophilic bacterium capable of producing bioplastics. This work was published in Microbial Biotechnology (doi: 10.1111/1751-7915.70103).
We reviewed recent advances in expanding the substrate scope of Pseudomonas cell factories, including our own work on lignocellulosic sugars. This article appeared in Current Opinion in Biotechnology (doi: 10.1016/j.copbio.2025.103270).
We constructed the first synthetic bacterial consortium in which the relationship between the two members is stabilized by a novel interaction mechanism we termed “reciprocal substrate processing.” This study was published in Synthetic Biology (doi: 10.1093/synbio/ysaf012).
…and several additional projects pushing the limits of bacterial cell factories are currently in preparation.
Equally importantly, Barbora Burýšková successfully defended her PhD dissertation on engineering synthetic Pseudomonas consortia for the valorization of lignocellulosic sugars and our undergraduate students Miroslav Rosputinský, Denis Pšenka, and Kristýna Lipovská successfully defended three outstanding theses focused on the development of a new genome-scale metabolic model, a CRISPR/Cas system for Caldimonas, and the characterization of different Pseudomonas chassis strains.
Throughout the year, we presented our research at numerous meetings and conferences and contributed to the organization of several major events, including Metabolic Engineering 16 in Copenhagen and Designer Biology 2025 in Newcastle. We also organized the kickoff meeting of the Czech SynBio Node platform in Brno.
Finally, we were awarded two new grants from the Czech Science Foundation and established several new collaborations. These efforts will lead to important discoveries and help us unlock the untapped metabolic potential of bacteria - our central mission, both now and in the future as we believe that discovering better microbial biocatalysts and pushing their limits through bioengineering is essential for developing competitive and truly sustainable biotechnologies.
