September 30
@
4:00 PM
–
5:00 PM
Hal S. Alper
Professor & Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Texas-Austin
Austin, TX
Beyond the test-tube: metabolic engineering for next-generation applications
Advances in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology can enable microbes to produce nearly any organic molecule of interest—from biofuels to biopolymers to pharmaceuticals. While this approach has fueled the industrial biotechnology, new challenges arise for microbe engineering when considering non-conventional settings. This talk will highlight several unique application areas for metabolic engineering. First, the use of engineered biology for the degradation of waste products (including plastics and other hydrophobic substrates) will be discussed considering the unique challenges required to consume these non-carbohydrate substrates. Second, the use of a printable hydrogel system for encapsulating cells will be discussed as a means for both portable cultivation of engineered microbial systems as well as for responsive theranostics. Third, the engineering of microbial factories for space environments will be discussed. Robust “space-ready” organisms require an understanding of how cells respond to the unique challenges and stressors of space including microgravity, radiation, and desiccation. Together, these efforts demonstrate how to deploy metabolically engineered cells outside of traditional sugar-based bioreactor settings.