Bioactive compounds as main economic drivers for sustainable biorefineries

Abstract

This document describes a PhD proposal framed in a doctoral college entitled “PhD program TU Wien bioactive - Technologies for Drug Discovery and Production”. This project focuses on two main core thematic units: discovery of novel bioactive substances and sustainable production of pharmaceuticals. The first thematic unit focuses on discovering new bioactive substances with pharmaceutical application potential from fungi and plants. The second thematic focuses on the development of a sustainable production process for pharmaceuticals. The present PhD proposal is embedded in this second thematic unit. The presented PhD project is entitled: “Bioactive compounds as main economic drivers for sustainable biorefineries”. The main goal is to use a renewable plant biomass as nutrient source for the bioprocesses of the fungal expression hosts and set up a sustainable biorefinery for maximal resource utilization of the remaining components of the plant biomass. All activities are planned to fulfill requirements of the General Agreement of the project and are subjected to scientific and dissemination activities. Scientific requirements of the project are based on five publications, three of which must be accepted and two must be submitted. Three of these publications must be as first-author and only one can be a non-original publication (review paper). In addition, 14 ECTS have to be fulfilled as part of the doctoral college with specific lectures opened by the coordinators of the college. The project duration is 36 months starting on February 1, 2019 and finishing on January 31, 2022.