Innovation Capabilities & Products

Morbidostat is a computer-controlled continuous culture device that automatically adjusts drug concentration to maintain constant growth inhibition in microbial cultures. As bacteria acquire mutations that give them resistance against drugs, they are able to tolerate higher drug concentrations and grow faster, thus removing selective pressure, the driving force of evolution. To compensate for this, morbidostat increases drug concentration sufficiently to keep bacteria at their original growth rate, therefore maintaining selective pressure over time. This system allows for data acquisition to model microbial evolution under antimicrobial stress, optimize biocide dosage strategies and develop highly antimicrobial-resistant strains used to test the performance of new biocides, among other applications.

GenSSI is a toolbox that requires MATLAB and Symbolic Math Toolbox. It offers a technique for studying structural identifiability using iterative Lie derivatives and identifiability tableaus.

More information here,

Development of mathematical algorithms and simulation software for global optimization and control of bioprocesses in the food and biotechnological industry

The saCeSS library allows solving non-linear programming (NLP) and mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problems. It also offers efficient local solvers for nonlinear parameter estimation problems associated with complex models (e.g. those described by differential equations).

More information here.

Authors: M. Rodríguez-Fernández and J. R. Banga

Description: SensSB is an easy-to-use Matlab®-based sensitivity analysis software toolbox. This tool integrates a variety of local and global sensitivity methods that can be applied to biological models described by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) or differential algebraic equations (DAEs). SensSB is also able to import models in the Systems Biology Mark-up Language (SBML) format.

Available here upon request.

Design and development of seafood products for target consumers (elderly, young, diabetic, allergic to seafood, etc.) that guarantee specific nutritional requirements, safety and sustainability. Development of techniques (i.e. metabolomics, proteomics, genomics, lipidomics, etc.), using animal models and cell cultures, to characterize the response of a patient/consumer to diet and to design personalized nutrition treatments and products (i.e. nutraceutics, hypoallergenic fish products, immunostimulants, functional foods, etc).

SYNBADm is a Matlab-based toolbox for the automatic design of biological circuits with targeted functions from component libraries.

More information here.

Method described in Csendes, T., L. Pal, J.O.H. Sendin, J.R. Banga (2008) The GLOBAL Optimization Method Revisited. Optimization Letters, 2(4):445-454.

Software available upon request (email us if interested).

Assessment and development of protocols to identify the most problematic areas and products in terms of microbial contamination and parasitic infestation along the value chain of seafood products.

AMIGO2 is a MATLAB-based multiplatform toolbox designed to solve mathematical optimization problems at the core of systems biology, within the context of parametric model identification, the underlying hypothesis for model development and the optimal control of biological systems to synthetically achieve the desired behavior.

More information here.