BATS

Date/Time:

Apr 9, 2021 - 12:00 PM

Location:

Hosts:

Bevin Engelward

Speaker:

Title:

Whole-cell Bacterial Sensors for Environmental DNA Detection

Abstract:

DNA detection is used for disease diagnosis, agriculture, industrial monitoring, and ecological tracking. While advances have been made in cost and portability, the need to manually collect samples is limiting. Here we engineer naturally competent Bacillus subtilis to build autonomous whole-cell DNA sensors. We show that engineered B. subtilis can take up exogenous DNA sequences and then turn on an output gene via a homologous recombination mechanism. Whole-cell DNA sensors could be applied for spatially-resolved large-scale DNA detection.

Speaker:

Title:

Design of Self-assembling Enzymatically Modified Peptides to Reproduce Cephalopod Dynamic Coloration

Abstract:

Current state-of-the-art photonic nanomaterials rely heavily on the use of expensive and environmentally damaging rare earth metals to derive their optical and electronic properties. On the other hand, naturally occurring bionanomaterials, such as squid chromatophore, are found to exhibit equally impressive properties through post-translational biomolecular modifications. Here, I will discuss the bottom-up design of self-assembling enzymatically modified peptides mined from computer simulation as an attempt to reproduce cephalopod properties.