Cultivation: Preserve – Enrich – Isolate

The ultimate challenge of this BMBF initiative and our project is the cultivation and isolation of novel, previously inaccessible microorganisms. We see the preservationof the active target organisms over a longer period of time as the initial step in a successful cultivation. In the second step, depending on the nature of the tasks in question, selective enrichmentshould take place, supported by modern screening methods. While the preservation of the organisms is to take place entirely in the MultiKulti reactor, we plan to carry out enrichment cultures both in the separate side reactors and in conventional batch cultures outside of the reactor system.

The most critical step is the isolationof the target organism into a stable pure strain. The chances of success of this last step should be increased by preserving the active microbial community in the reactor.

The following work steps are planned:

• Enrichment and cultivation approaches with classical methods
• Omics-based enrichment and cultivation
• Metadata-based enrichment and cultivation
• Systematic and innovative enrichment and cultivation approaches