ICL Synthetic Biology Seminar Series
Join us on March 22nd 2016 for the second talk in our series of seminars on synthetic biology from exciting external speakers.
The main talk will be preceeded by a short talk from Imperial’s Dr Thomas Ouldridge After the talk we will have wine and refreshments outside the lecture theatre.
Main Talk: Dr Arren Bar-Even (MPI Golm)
Synthetic metabolism and the formate bio-economy concept: addressing humanity’s grand challenges
The progress made through basic research in the physics and chemistry fields during the 19th and 20th century directly led to the engineering and technology explosion we are witnessing in the last decades. Now it’s the turn for life sciences. Our growing understanding of the design principles and biochemical logic that control the evolution and function of living organisms enables us to re-wire biological systems for our needs. This is the basis of the synthetic biology revolution. In this talk, I shall discuss one central sub-field of synthetic biology, namely metabolic engineering (i.e. synthetic metabolism), which aims at manipulating the metabolic network of mostly microbes for the production of value-added chemicals and growth on non-standards but promising feedstocks. I shall focus mostly on the formate bio-economy concept that put forward the idea that formic acid/formate can serve as an ideal mediator between the physicochemical and biological realms, i.e., formate can be synthesized efficiently using excess energy and then serve as sole source for microbial growth and chemical production. As the natural formate assimilation pathways are either inefficient or are constrained to organisms that are difficult to cultivate and engineer, an advantageous strategy is to adapt model industrial organisms to formatotrophic growth using synthetic, specially tailored formate-assimilation routes. Several studies have begun to tackle this challenge by applying engineering principles to integrate existing enzymes into synthetic metabolic routes with promising characteristics, or, even more boldly, by evolving completely new enzymes to support efficient formate assimilation. I shall discuss these two general strategies, demonstrating the capacity of synthetic metabolism to tackle humanity’s grand challenges.
About the speaker:
Dr. Arren Bar-Even completed his bachelor studies at the Excellence Program of the Technion, the Israeli Institute of technology. He recived his M.Sc. from the Weizmann Institute of Science, specializing in bioinformatics and systems biology. He then spent 4 years in the bioindustry, heading the R&D department of a small startup company, SegaChem, aiming at developing novel insect repelant agents for agriculture. Returning to academy, he completed his Ph.D. studies in the Ron Milo group at Weizmann Institute, studying cellular metabolism. He is currently an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology.
Short Talk: Dr Thomas Ouldridge (Imperial College)
Exploring the design space of DNA nanotechnology
Timetable of the evening:
4.00 pm Dr Thomas Ouldridge
4:30 pm Dr Arren Bar-Even
5:30 pm Refreshments