Introducing Our Authors pubs.acs.org/synthbio
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MEIRONG GAO
Current Position. Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University Interdepartmental Biological Sciences, Advisor: Neil L. Kelleher. Education. B.S. University of Minnesota. Nonscientific Interests. Biking, reading, sailing, and camping. Natural products promise a renewable source of lead compounds for therapeutic and industrial applications, but discovering new compounds is rarely straightforward. Many natural product producing organisms tightly regulate the biosynthesis of the molecules they produce, but those natural products could be directly accessed by heterologous expression of their entire pathways. In this paper, we explored the use of cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) platform based on E. coli lysate to express nonribosomal peptide biosynthesis (NRPS) enzymes and demonstrate that they are functionally compatible with the conditions of CFPS by producing a dipeptide diketopiperazine. This work is promising because NRPS are one of the most diverse biosynthetic classes of natural products, and CFPS allows rapid experiments for prototyping. (Read Goering’s article DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00160).
Kwang Shiong Wong
Current Position. Research Assistant, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, NSF-Center for Biorenewable Chemicals, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Education. B.S. in Biochemical Engineering, Xiamen University, China; M.S. in Fermentation Engineering, Shandong University, China; Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering, Iowa State University, Advisor: Dr. Zengyi Shao. Nonscientific Interests. Badminton, running, and movies. I am interested in engineering the nonconventional yeast species, Schef fersomyces stipitis (formerly known as Pichia stipitis), to produce biofuels, and novel chemicals derived from shikimate pathway, and downstream aromatic amino acid pathway. Comparing with model microbial platforms, S. stipitis possesses a highly active pentose phosphate pathway. Moreover, S. stipitis is one of the best microorganisms that could utilize xylose naturally, and produces bioethanol at very high yield. So it is a potent strain to be used in the industry scale of biofuel and chemical production from plant biomass. However, carbon catabolite repression is one of the major challenges for the wider application of S. stipitis. To make S. stipitis more competitive, I am now working on discovering xylose-specific transporters free from glucose repression. (Read Gao’s article DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00132).
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Masahiro Kanno
Current Position. Researcher, Asahi Kasei Corporation, Japan. Education. M.S. in Bioscience and Informatics, Keio University (2012), Advisor: Prof. Kenji Miyamoto; Visiting researcher in Chemistry, University of California, Davis (2014− 2016), Advisor: Prof. Shota Atsumi. Nonscientific Interests. Hiking, traveling, playing tennis, and watching baseball. My research interest is to utilize cyanobacteria for chemical production for the replacement of petroleum-based chemicals. Current productivity of photoautotrophic chemical production is too low for industrial application. I believe that photoheterotrophic production in which abundant and less expensive feedstocks are utilized in addition to CO2 is one solution to boost the productivities. In this study, we demonstrate the idea of using glycerol in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 under diurnal lighting conditions. I would like to improve the system further to
ANTHONY GOERING
Received: December 30, 2016 Published: January 20, 2017
Theresa Fakler
© 2017 American Chemical Society
MASAHIRO KANNO
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DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00398 ACS Synth. Biol. 2017, 6, 3−5
ACS Synthetic Biology
Introducing Our Authors
Education. M.Sc. Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. Nonscientific Interests. Visiting natural places, reading and watching scientific, political and economic news, running, and soccer. My interdisciplinary research addresses the design of molecular systems for performing computation in general, and signal processing in particular. The impetus of molecular computation is its compatibility with living cells and massive parallelization, as millions of biomolecular reactions fire to complete in a human cell each second. In this paper, by introducing a new molecular coding of data called f ractional encoding, we describe a systematic method for the design and implementation of a molecular system computing univariate polynomials. We would like to expand the application of fractional encoding to design molecular systems for more complex computations. (Read Salehi’s article DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.5b00163).
achieve industrial relevant productivity. (Read Kanno’s article DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00239).
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XIAOPING OLSON
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Xiaoping Olson
Current Position. Ph.D. Candidate, Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering, Boise State University, Advisor: Dr. William Hughes. Education. B.S. and M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, Shenyang University of Technology, China. Nonscientific Interests. Exploring caves, traveling overseas, exotic cuisines, and exploring a whole new world with my two sons. My Ph.D. work is focused on leakage reduction to improve the sensitivity and stability of toehold-mediated strand displacement systems. From a materials science and engineering perspective, defect engineering has improved the leakage performance of model strand displacement systems. Engineered defects used include mismatched base pairs and locked nucleic acids. My research provides insight into the sources of leakage in DNA strand-displacement systems, as well as how to maximize stranddisplacement performance via the selective introduction of hybridization defects. Rational design of future nucleic acid signal amplification circuits will lead to broader applications in a variety of fields that range from DNA computation to point-of-care diagnostics and therapeutics. (Read Olson’s article DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.5b00231).
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ZENGYI SHAO
Meng Lin
Current Position. Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, NSF-Center for Biorenewable Chemicals, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Education. B.S. in Biochemistry, Nankai University, China; Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana−Champaign, Advisor: Dr. Huimin Zhao; Postdoc in University of Illinois, Urbana−Champaign, Advisor: Dr. Huimin Zhao. Nonscientific Interests. Travel and music. Shao’s research group specializes in tailoring host selection according to need. Her group is intrigued by the special biochemical and metabolic features possessed by many nonconventional microbes. These high-performance characteristics are usually conferred by a network of genes via a hierarchy of regulations that are intrinsically complex, making the horizontal transfer of these functions into model hosts very challenging. The research described in her article demonstrates that Schef fersomyces stipitis is better-suited platform host than the model yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for producing shikimate pathway derivatives due to the much higher availability of the limiting precursor. Shao’s group aims to develop platform technologies to provide generalizable strain-engineering solutions, enabling rapid functional modifications of high-performance nonconventional microbes and expanding the current collection of microbial factories. (Read Shao’s article DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00132).
SAYED AHMAD SALEHI
Shitong Song
Current Position. Research Assistant, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Advisors: Dr. Keshab Parhi and Dr. Marc Riedel. 4
DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00398 ACS Synth. Biol. 2017, 6, 3−5
ACS Synthetic Biology
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Introducing Our Authors
YUNAN ZHENG
Yunan Zheng
Current Position. Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Chemistry, Boston College, Advisor: Prof. Abhishek Chatterjee. Education. M.S. (Department of Chemistry, Boston College, Advisor: Prof. Evan Kantrowitz), B.S. (Department of Chemistry, Beijing Normal University). Nonscientific Interests. Culinary adventures and experimenting in the kitchen to come up with easy-to-reproduce recipes, as well as decompressing with sci-fi and thriller movies. My research focuses on incorporation of unnatural amino acids (UAAs) into proteins via the genetic code expansion methodology, particularly within living mammalian cells and tissues. In our paper, we evaluated the optimal relative expression levels of all components required for this methodology through a baculovirus gene delivery vector, and generated a highly efficient expression system. Moving forward, we aim to improve the scope of incorporating multiple UAAs into proteins expressed in mammalian cells. (Read Zheng’s article DOI: 10.1021/ acssynbio.6b00092).
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DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00398 ACS Synth. Biol. 2017, 6, 3−5
