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I became a member of the MicrobAdapt team in February 2022 for my post-graduate (bachelor's degree in biotechnology) internship. I am involved in the project aiming to develop a new, sensible electrochemical biosensor for acetoin. Such a biosensor will help detect acetoin at low doses in complex matrices (e.g. beer or wine) and would be very useful to food industry. We want to challenge already-exisitng colorimetric methods for acetoin detection which are time-consuming and require sophisticated laboratory set-up. We believe that designing a quick and simple method based on biosensing will vastly impact beverages' production.

Our first objective is to produce a stable and active form of the biosensor: an enzyme acetoin reductase, which will be later immobilized on the biosensor's surface.
The project started with the transformation of E. coli BL21 cells with a plasmid containing the sequence for acetoin reductase linked to GST tag sequence. Subsequently, we started the production culture and expressed the recombinant protein in bacterial cells, testing different expression conditions. In the next stage we purified the enzyme from the bacterial culture using the means of affinity chromatography. 
Next stage of the project requires testing the enzyme's activity and effective binding to the biosensor's surface.
The most important part of the project now is optimizing enzyme's production and purification in a way that these stages do not affect negatively its enzymatic activity.