Category: General

A special congratulations to our PhD student Subhasis Behera´s team BeeYOND for achieving 1st place in the competition – Nucleate Baltics Genesis Demo Day 2026 at Deep Tech Atelier 2026! 

Over the past months, talented and passionate innovators from across Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came together to transform scientific ideas into impactful biotech and deep tech solutions.  

BeeYOND idea was to create honey without bees—while preserving the same nutritional and functional benefits. Using locally sourced ingredients and precision fermentation, the team aims to produce a bee-free honey rich in enzymes and antioxidants.  

Wild honeybees are increasingly at risk of extinction across the EU, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of traditional honey production. At the same time, the European honey market is projected to grow by 4.8% by 2030, driven by rising awareness of honey’s health benefits, including immune system support. Consumers are also shifting toward natural sweeteners over synthetic alternatives. 

Currently, local honey production meets only about 63% of demand, while up to 46% of imported honey is suspected to be adulterated. BeeYOND addresses both sustainability and quality challenges by offering a reliable and innovative alternative to conventional honey.  

“We need a sustainable source of honey without risking the honey-bee popluation.” 

Looking forward to tasting “Bee-Free-Honey” in the future! 

As a part of biofoundry under establishment, bioengineering lab received its very own growth profiler. The state-of-the-art machine allows high throughput screening of microbial strains and growth media on µL scale. The Head of Automation Juliano Sabedotti de Biaggi described that the growth profiler can fit up to ten autoclavable 96-well microtiter plates, allowing monitoring 960 conditions at once. “However, usually the tests are conducted in triplicates which means monitoring of 320 strains or growth medias in parallel. The advantage of the microplates are that they can be covered with a lid, allowing control of gas exchange and evaporation. The machine is complemented with a camera which performs online optical density measurements, therefore obsoleting the need to measure each sample individually and manually.” With as many as 960 samples we are relieved to have this automated function!

The machine is a valuable asset for bioengineering laboratory as it offers the possibility of broader screening of microbial strains. Therefore microbial strains with different mutations can be screened at once, broadening the possibility to find the ones with best characteristics.

The growth profiler was sourced under DigiBio joint project with TalTech, University of Tartu and Danish Technical University, which received 15 million € from European Union and 15 million € from Estonian government.