Guest Seminar - Living Fabrications by the Engineered Bacteria
A key focus of synthetic biology is to utilize modular biological building blocks to assemble the cell-based circuits. Scientists have programmed the living organisms using these circuits to attain multiple delicate and well-defined functions. With the integration of tools or technologies from other disciplines, these rewired cells can achieve even more complex tasks. In this talk, we will present our recent work in versatile biomanufacturing of biologics and functional material fabrication by integrating the engineered cells and polymer physics and chemistry. By exploiting cell-material feedback, we are able to design a concise platform to achieve versatile production, analysis, and purification of diverse proteins and protein complexes, and also assembly of functional living materials. Our work demonstrates the use of the feedback between living cells and materials to engineer a modular and flexible platform with sophisticated yet well-defined programmed functions.
Dr Zhuojun Dai received her Bachelor degree from Zhejiang University. She obtained PhD degree in chemistry from The Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Prof Chi Wu, where she investigated the polymer chain dynamics, interactions between the polycations and polyanions from the view of polymer physics. Then, she undertook postdoctoral training at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University in Prof Lingchong You's lab, where she integrated the tools from synthetic biology and material science to build a versatile manufacturing platform. Since Sep, 2018, she started her lab in iSynBio, focusing on the living fabrications by the engineered bacteria. Her lab’s work have been published in journals including Nature Chemical Biology and Nature Communications.
Tel: (852) 2358 8483 / Email: bien@ust.hk