The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering is pleased to welcome guest speaker José L. Avalos, PhD., from Princeton University to present his seminar:
"Building smarter microbial factories with spatial and temporal controls using organelle engineering and optogenetics."
Engineered microorganisms are powerful cell factories for producing fuels, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other valuable products. However, achieving commercially viable titers, yields, and productivities remains challenging. Spatial and temporal control of engineered metabolism offers promising strategies to overcome these limitations.
In the first part of my talk, I will present advances in compartmentalizing biosynthetic pathways within yeast mitochondria and engineered biomolecular condensates. I will discuss how targeting pathways to mitochondria and manipulating mitochondrial morphology can enhance chemical production, as well as strategies to engineer synthetic condensates that recruit enzymes, small molecules, and biological membranes to channel metabolic flux and exploit membrane functions.
In the second part, I will highlight our pioneering work using optogenetics to dynamically regulate microbial metabolism. Light provides tunable, reversible, and programmable control, enabling new approaches to fermentation automation and optimization. I will describe optogenetic systems that improve chemical production by controlling microbial growth and metabolism, overcoming limited light penetration in high-density bioreactors, and dynamically regulating population composition in microbial consortia.
Together, these advances demonstrate how integrating spatial and temporal control can establish a new paradigm in metabolic engineering, expanding the capabilities of microbial cell factories.
José L. Avalos, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, and The Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment of Princeton University
José Avalos earned a B.E. in chemical engineering from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and an MSc in biochemical research from Imperial College in London. He then received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from Johns Hopkins University. He conducted postdoctoral research at The Rockefeller University on molecular neuroscience, and then at MIT/Whitehead Institute, in the Department of Chemical Engineering on metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. He has been a faculty member at Princeton University since 2015, where he leads a research group focused on the use of biotechnology to address challenges in renewable energy, sustainable manufacturing, the environment, and human health. He has received several awards, including the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellowship, the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship Award, the Pew scholarship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the HHMI Gilliam award, and the ACS BIOT Young Investigator Award.
Cost: Free
Olivia Wise
Email