Description:

Mark Styczinski of Georgia Tech.

Host: Keith Tyo

Short bio:
Mark Styczynski is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A major emphasis of his research is the use of synthetic biology to develop low-cost, minimal-equipment diagnostics for the developing world. He also uses metabolomics to study multiple model systems and to drive development of computational modeling techniques to improve metabolic engineering. He has received NSF’s CAREER award, DARPA’s Young Faculty Award, and NIH’s MIRA Young Investigator award. He is on the editorial board for Mathematical Biosciences, and is the founding president of the Metabolomics Association of North America.

Title:
Applying synthetic biology for minimal-equipment, point-of-care diagnostics

Abstract:
Millions of people die every year from deficiencies in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), mostly in the developing world. The cost of providing micronutrient supplementation precludes global-scale interventions and requires more targeted allocation of limited aid resources. However, existing methods to measure micronutrient status are so expensive and logistically difficult that insufficient clinical data is available to know which regions most need help. A low-cost way to measure micronutrient status of patient populations in low-resource environments could let agencies better allocate their resources, impacting millions of lives. This is a challenging task, though, as detection must also be semi-quantitative: all samples have micronutrients, the question is whether the levels are sufficient. Semi-quantitative measurement modalities typically require expensive analytical instruments that are infeasible in these environments.

Our group has developed minimal-equipment biosensors capable of sensing zinc (a critical micronutrient) and producing visible colors indicating the zinc concentration. We have developed a whole-cell biosensor in E. coli, and have shown that the diagnostic thresholds between colors can be tuned using synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. We have developed genetic circuits that allow these cells to rapidly produce color on a timescale consistent with the demands of micronutrient surveillance campaigns in the field, and we have shown that these sensor cells are active in high concentrations of untreated human serum. We have also recently developed an analogous cell-free TX-TL assay that produces semi-quantitative visible readouts in an hour, with built-in, sample matrix-specific quantitative standards.

We aim to use this framework for portable, low-cost, low-resource measurement to eventually develop a suite of micronutrient sensors (whether whole-cell or cell-free) to help address micronutrient deficiency on a global scale.