Microbial Physiology

The working group Microbial Physiology has close links with the Section of Microbial Biotechnology (formerly Technical Microbiology) of the Royal Dutch Society for Microbiology (www.knvm.org).
The focus of the working group is the (workability) physiology of micro-organisms. The working group is interested how to develop new biotechnological processes from the physiology or existing processes can be optimized. "Old-fashioned" enzyme activity measurements and flux analysis can be combined with "state of the art" sequencing and 'omics' technologies to characterize the physiology of microorganisms. Never before in the history of the biotechnology, it was possible to quickly get a complete view of the potential capabilities of micro-organisms and the proportion of them to be expressed in certain circumstances. The major challenge in the physiology is to characterize the relationships of the genes, proteins, enzymes, metabolites, substrates and products lead to a certain physiological state of a cell.