People
Dr. Ir. Rinke van Tatenhove-Pel
Assistant Professor
- +31 15 27 82456
- R.J.vanTatenhove-Pel@tudelft.nl
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Room number: B58.B1.140
Sagarika Bangalore Govindaraju
PhD candidate
- S.BangaloreGovindaraju@tudelft.nl
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Room number: B58.C0.060
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After my Bachelor’s in Biotechnology from Bangalore, India and my Master’s in Life Science and Technology at TU Delft, I developed a fascination for solving pertinent global challenges using microbes.
In my PhD project, I am working on developing a high-throughput screening and selection platform. The platform is based on a robust and powerful microdroplet based cultivation system, which allows us to culture millions of microbes in parallel.
Using this platform, we want to understand how different environments influence the fitness of microbial consortia. Microbes in nature commonly interact with each other, but most biotechnological processes are based on monocultures. We want to use our platform to decipher how and why microbes interact under different conditions. Using this knowledge, we want to develop methods to select for microbial consortia with interesting properties for industrial applications.
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I grew up in Germany and graduated in 2015 from the University of Münster in Biology. Not being sure what I wanted to do with my degree, I moved to Chile to work on Protein molecular dynamics at the PUC Chile for two years. Back in Europe, I started a Masters in Genetics at the University of Leiden and graduated in 2020. After a short period working in Leiden as a technician for commercial vaccine research I started my PhD in April 2022 at the Industrial Microbiology group, hoping to finally satisfy my ‘pleasure of finding things out’ as an independent researcher.
In my project, I am looking for new ways to screen yeast cells for improved metabolism. Together with Rinke, I’m looking at easy-to-produce droplet emulsions in which cells can be cultured with a defined amount of substrate. These pico-liter sized reactors can then be screened with high-throughput technologies, like FACS, to obtain improved organisms that can for example grow better on low-emission substrates like ethanol. Another part of my project focusses on engineering microbial communities, allowing them to co-feed on dynamic feed-streams. This will help to adapt to reactors with mixed substrates, such as lignocellulose.