ERC Starting Grant project BEBOP

With colleagues at IMFT (P Assémat, S Lorthois, M Ogier, S Cazin, M Marchal, J Lefort, E Libert, P Swider, O Liot, P Duru), the BEBOP team (JD Julien, G Ramos-Peroni, N Waisbord, C Papadopoulos, M Benbelkacem), U. Toulouse (M Delarue et L Malaquin @ LAAS, C Coudret, C Roux and D Ciuculescu-Pradines @ IMRCP, C Roques @ LGC), U. Oxford (WPJ Smith, KR Foster), U. Rennes (T le Borgne).

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 803074). CORDIS link here.

Microorganisms possess the remarking ability to form biofilms, 3D communities such as those found on dental plaque.

The scope of the EU-funded BEBOP project is to understand the biophysical mechanisms underlying the formation of such structures in complex environments such as porous media.

Using a combination of microfluidics, bioreactor experiments, fluorescence and X-ray imaging, researchers are investigating the underpinning biophysical processes.

Dissecting the interactions between biofilms and their environment will provide fundamental knowledge in biomechanics and physical ecology, and also pave the way towards novel biotechnologies for industrial and societal applications, such as wastewater processing and bioremediation of soils.

The first scientific objective is thus to gain insight into how fluid flow, transport phenomena and biofilms interact within connected multiscale heterogeneous structures – a major scientific challenge with wide-ranging implications.

To this end, we will combine microfluidic and 3D printed micro-bioreactor experiments; fluorescence and X-ray imaging; high performance computing blending CFD, individual-based models and pore network approaches.

The second scientific objective is to create the primary building blocks toward a control theory of bacteria in porous media and innovative designs of microbial bioreactors. Building upon the previous objective, we first aim to extract from the complexity of biological responses the most universal engineering principles applying to such systems.

We will then design a novel porous micro-bioreactor to demonstrate how the permeability and solute residence times can be controlled in a dynamic, reversible and stable way – an initial step toward controlling reaction rates.

ERC Starting Grant project BEBOP

Share