Guest Seminar - Microbe-inspired Bioengineering: from Nano to Global

Microbial life comprises majority of the global biodiversity. Their biology inspires engineering in two ways: 1) they encode enzymes that can be garnered and modified to execute desired functions, and 2) their behavior teaches us simple design principles that give rise to complexity and order. In this talk, I will introduce my past work in both aspects across scales and discuss how the combination of both can provide novel solutions to long-standing issues in public health, energy, and the environment. First, I will introduce the use of nanofabrication and microfluidic devices for understanding how nanoscale protein interactions drive the behavior of global patterns that are orders of magnitude larger. Second, I will show how global exploration of deep-sea microbiome led to the discovery of enzymes with new functions at the nanoscale. Finally, I will discuss my current and future work on the topic of biological nitrogen fixation and argue that systems-scale integration of microbial resource and behavior in synthetic biology is key to achieving scalable applications of complex biological functions.