The HotDrops project involved the exchange of personnel between the industrial and the academy partners, and the recruitment of new researchers. A total of 98 months of secondments and 98 months of recruitment were funded by the EU, allowing the training of 22 fellows along the whole project.

The research activities were divided in the work packages distributed along the project according to the planned progress. The first period of the project was focused on four major goals: (i) training and standardization of assays at high temperatures in microfluidic format, (ii) the setting of an in vitro transcription translation systems derived from Thermus thermophilus, and (iii) the construction of two types of gene libraries, one from metagenomic DNA isolated from thermal effluents in Galicia and other made of gene variants from mesophilic enzymes. During the second period of the project the selection settings were used, and thermostable new enzymes and variants were identified, the best of which were produced at lab-scale and characterized. The potential use of the selected enzymes in an industrial context was studied by the industrial partners of the project. In addition to the personnel specifically trained in this action, and to the specific enzymes isolated, the most relevant results of this project have allowed the development of a low cost and super-high throughput selection platform for the screening of thermostable enzymes.

The research methodology and approach to be used in the RTD actions of this project was distributed in the following Work Packages:

 

WP1. Management

WP2: Thermostable in vitro transcription- translation (t-IVTT)

WP3: IVC-microfluidics workflow development

WP 4: Library construction

WP5: Library screening

  

WP6: Protein characterization

WP7: Protein production & Downstream processing

 

WP9: Communication and dissemination.