Luminous fingerprint for lab meat and more.

Future products will be manufactured in bioreactors. A spin-off company from Boko Vienna is using new microscopy technology to improve quality control and thus prevent contamination with pathogens.

Cruelty-free meat, plastics without fossil oils, penicillin and beer – all of these things have one thing in common: they rely on products that can be produced by microorganisms. Yeasts, bacteria and microalgae have been “domesticated” by humans over the centuries and their metabolisms harnessed to produce valuable products. Many things in our daily lives, from food to medicine, would not exist without these little helpers.

Light recognizes germs

To ensure that only beneficial microorganisms are at work, and that there are no unwanted or even dangerous germs, such biological processes require constant monitoring. So-called bioprocess monitoring is therefore essential – but it is also labor-intensive and expensive. Samples must be taken at regular intervals and examined manually under a microscope or cultured on a nutrient medium over several days and analyzed.

A group of scientists and economists from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BUKO) in Vienna now want to make monitoring easier, more efficient and less expensive using a newly developed technology. The university’s project team is supported by the Austrian Wirtschaftsservice (aws). anthropomorphic He improved on a technique that had been known for a long time: stereoscopic microscopy. This doesn’t mean Star Wars-style 3D projections, but rather measuring the phase shift of light as it shines through an object. The material slows down the speed of the light and scatters it, resulting in a change in the wavelength of light that can be measured compared to light that doesn’t shine through the object. From this, researchers can extract a variety of spatial anatomical parameters of the luminous object and thus identify a wide range of microorganisms.

shoe box microscope

on Colloid and Biointerface Research Institute At Poco Vienna, Peter van Oostrom, the company’s scientific director, has optimized the technology first for scientific purposes, and then also for practical use. By slightly changing the incidence rate of light and analyzing complex data, the team was able to shrink the stereomicroscope to the size of a shoebox. “In order to reliably identify different types of microorganisms, we use specially adapted AI that can extract maximum information from complex images,” explains co-founder Pinar Frank. “Improving the microscope was the absolute basis for this, because AI is only as good as the data you feed it.”

There are many areas of application for holographic biomonitoring. In both food and pharmaceutical production, the composition of samples taken from bioreactors can be analyzed automatically and around the clock. Also future technologies such as lab meat, fuel from microalgae or carbon dioxide₂“Separating bacteria from air could benefit from the Austrian development,” says Markus Lipsmuhlbacher, managing director of Holoid. “Improved monitoring could lead to improved economic efficiency and product safety, thus helping these ideas to achieve a breakthrough.”