Arvi Jõers, associate professor of molecular microbiology

Molecular biology has enjoyed rapid development over the last 30 years. We are now entering a new era – instead of just studying it we can start engineering biology. This means building new functions and systems into living cells, giving them properties that do not occur in nature. Our main project is to engineer bacterium Escherichia coli, a workhorse in industrial biotechnology, in a way that gives us a complete control over its growth. This enables more advanced metabolic engineering and allows high productivity strains to be built.

Our lab got started in 2019, so everything is fresh and new. So far there are 4 of us:

Arvi Jõers, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, group leader   

Marje Kasari, PhD, Research Fellow

Villu Kasari, PhD, Research Fellow

Mirjam Kärmas, Master´s student

Koit Kõrgnurm, undergraduate

We are looking for new people and collaborations, so if you are interested in synthetic biology, please give us a call or send an e-mail.

Tel: +372 737 5041

arvi.joers@ut.ee

Industry collaboration

FastMicro project with TFTAK

There are hundreds of different microbes in the human gut. Many could be useful as probiotics, but growing them in larger amounts is technically difficult. Most of these microbes are obligate anaerobes and do not tolerate oxygen. During this project we will develop a platform technology for growth medium optimization for anaerobic bacteria. This technology speeds up the discovery process and paves the way for the next generation probiotics.