The National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and German Research Foundation (DFG) announced the list of the granted Sino-German programs for the year 2017 after independent evaluations by both committees. The 3-year joint research project co-applied by Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Freiburg University has been granted.

The project, CRISPR/Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated) systems in cyanobacteria, their involvement in cell differentiation and potential for metabolic manipulation, will be co-delivered by Prof. LU Xuefeng from Microbial Metabolic Engineering (MME) Group at QIBEBT and Prof. Wolfgang Hess from Freiburg University. This is the third international research project of MME during recent three years.

Since MME setup, the group has performed a wide cooperation with several leading research groups from Germany (Rostock University, Freiburg University), France (Pasteur Cyanobacteria Collection), Sweden (Uppsala University) and the Netherland (University of Amsterdam) in the field of cyanobacteria. The collaborated studies aim to understand regulatory mechanisms of a few basic cellular processes and to improve the productivity of target products.

In recent years, the group has encouraged researchers and students to have diversified and multi-level academic exchanges with their partners. In addition, the group has kept a close contact with partners about the newest research progresses on a regular basis. A series of results have been obtained during these cooperation and scientific papers have been co-published in the academic journals like Front in Microbiology (Savakis et al., 2016; Song et al., 2017), Applied Environmental Microbiology (Qiao et al., 2018) and Genome Announcements (Zhu et al., 2017).

Based on the current well-run projects, this group will further promote deep academic cooperation with international partners in forms of exchange visiting, co-applying programs, co-holding symposiums and co-publishing research papers.

(Text by LUO Quan and YANG Xutong)

Contact:

Dr. LU Xuefeng

Microbial Metabolic Engineering Group

Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Tel: 86-532-80662712

E-mail: lvxf@qibebt.ac.cn