So let's begin.

As Matthias already said, I'm in distributed energy process engineering for, in September,

two years, and I'm a bioengineer by training.

So my research area is bioelectrochemistry and bioelectrochemical energy systems, and

that's probably as interdisciplinary as it gets.

So let's start painting the bigger picture.

Bioelectrochemistry, what is that?

We have electrochemistry utilizing biocatalysts.

The easiest way to describe maybe very simplified electrochemistry is the direct connection

of electricity with chemical reactions.

So either we induce a chemical reaction by infusing electricity, or we have spontaneous

chemical reactions that generate electricity.

And what are biocatalysts?

And the ones from different research areas came probably across some microbial fermentations

in their past.

We all know photosynthesis processes, for example, from microalgae-consuming sunlight.

We know these sweet little cells, anaerobic bacteria or methanogenic archaea, when we

see the site of biogas plants doing anaerobic digestion.

And we know the oldest known-to-humankind fermentation process, the alcoholic fermentation,

where I several times today already heard we might be in for a treat of a demonstration

project by Professor Castellona later on.

So important to note, we have these sweet little cells that do biocatalysts, but the

real biocatalysts are actually hidden inside of their little proteins that we call enzymes.

And in this regard, we only regard the microorganisms as a protective functional shell at this point.

And the enzymes, the Nobel Prize winner Richard Wildstetter said very nicely, as I find, he

got the Nobel Prize in 1915 for discovering chlorophyll.

And he said, life is the orchestrated combination of processes catalyzed by enzymes.

I find this very beautiful, and it brings to the point how powerful enzymes are.

Enzymes are basically natural.

They are only carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, a little bit of sulfur, sometimes

a metal ion here or there, but completely organic compounds shaped by nature to do extremely

fast catalysis, stereoselective, regioselective, and substrate selective.

How do they do that?

We basically have amino acid chains that fold in a very specific 3D structure, and they

cope with the substrate, only one specific substrate in such a very specific way that

they build this enzyme substrate complex.

And they overcome the energy barrier associated with the reaction, here shown from A to B,

without a catalyst, not by one harsh conversion, but by thousands of little very weak interactions

that tweak and bend and break and spit out the product that we want by the formation

of several intermediate complexes.

And they can speed up a reaction up to 10 to the power of 17 times.

So we want to use this very potent catalyst enzymes, and now we only have to choose if

we use them in a purified version, very selective, very fast, but a little bit sensitive, or

we use them in the protective natural environments, meaning in the whole cells.

Now when we have made this choice, we go into our bioelectrochemical systems.

The largest market for bioelectrochemical systems are still the amperometric biosensors,

but in this research field, we are interested in these other galvanic cells, if you want.

So we talk about biofuel cells and bioelectrosynthesis cells.

So we functionalize electrodes with the biocatalyst of choice, and either we oxidize, we combust

fuel and generate electricity, or we invest electricity and we get out value-added chemicals.