Chemical Biotechnology

Learn from biology! Think like a chemist! Act as an engineer! The interdisciplinary Master’s program in Chemical Biotechnology at the Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability.What does a biotechnologist do?A biotechnologist analyses naturally occurring (micro)biological processes, adapts them to the requirements of his desired product and brings the adapted process to industrial production.What kind of knowledge is needed?On the one hand, knowledge in the field of microbiology and molecular biology is needed because it is important to know how to efficiently make available the enormous genetic resources from bacteria, fungi or plants that are available for biotechnological applications and how to optimise the metabolism of the corresponding production systems.However, also knowledge of chemistry is needed in order to develop biocatalytic processes. Biocatalysis is the basis for innovative and sustainable synthesis pathways in chemistry and it can be used to make reactions with enzymatic partial steps more sustainable.Finally, knowledge of process engineering is needed, as a biotechnologist has to scale the biotechnological processes developed in the laboratory to the technical scale and equip them with a tailor-made processing.This means that biotechnologists must be absolute experts in the combination of these three disciplines.That is why this course of studies is about the fact that its graduates are at home in the worlds of biology, chemistry and process engineering and therefore have a unique new view of existing and future processes and required procedures. This is the only way they can use biotechnological approaches to advance sustainability in various research fields in the chemical industry.