Joan Cortada Garcia

Joan is an IBioIC PhD student based at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Dr. Karl Burgess and working in collaboration with Ingenza Ltd. With a background in bioprocess engineering and experience in industrial fermentation, Joan is eager to explore the application of mass spectrometry to better understand and design fermentation processes.

Project Description:
Omics data is expanding our knowledge of biological systems. In the case of dynamic environments, as it is the case for batch and fed-batch fermentations (still the most common mode of operation in industry), gathering metabolomics data across a whole experiment in a real-time fashion can, therefore, become a very powerful tool to more thoroughly understand and better design fermentation process. With this type of technology, biological patterns, bottlenecks, genetic targets and new products can be identified at a level that pre-Omics data was not capable of, mainly due to the large amount of metabolites that can be simultaneously and very rapidly identified.

This IBioIC funded project aims at developing a robust system of fermentation analysis using real-time metabolomics and at exploring many potential applications of this technology. Furthermore, one of the focuses of this project is to discern between intracellular and extracellular metabolites, which can provide information of secretion pathways and compounds, both useful for product design and downstream processing.

Real-time analysis by mass spectrometry can be a powerful tool for applications from bioprocess and strain design and optimisation to fermentation monitoring and control.