UNLOCK Microbial Potential

UNLOCK is a unique facility for research on mixed microbial communities, the first of its kind worldwide. It's an experimental and data platform, enabling breakthrough research and knowledge sharing on natural and synthetic mixtures of microorganisms. More detailed: Microbial communities play crucial roles in various aspects of our society, from individual health to global greenhouse gas emissions. However, due to challenges in studying complex, symbiotic microorganisms, we have been able to isolate, study, and use no more than 1% of the natural microbial diversity. This means that we have overlooked a major fraction of the microbial potential available in nature. These challenges result in three major limitations in our current experimental procedures in research on microbial communities: 1. The lack of high-throughput cultivation facilities for parallel and comparative analysis of microbial ecosystems 2. The effective integration of these cultivation studies with molecular systems characterizations 3. The tight integration and transparent and uniform storage and processing of the generated data. UNLOCK, a unique research facility, addresses these limitations by enabling large-scale and efficient research on mixed microbial communities. The UNLOCK research infrastructure is composed of three complementary experimental platforms for high-throughput discovery and characterization of microbial communities and a FAIR-data platform for large scale data storage, data extraction and analysis of high-throughput data in a cloud-based infrastructure.