Congratulations to Biki Kundu and Esther Jimenez for their recent preprints on bioRxiv!

Esther induced substantial changes in the microstructure of our engineered living materials through relatively minor alterations to the sequence of the genome-encoded biopolymer. These sequence and structure alterations then propagated out to changes in rheological behavior. The insights gained will lead us closer to predictive design rules for ELMs. You can read “Genetically modifying the protein matrix of macroscopic living materials to control their structure and rheological properties” here.

In the next paper entitled “Extracellular Respiration is a Latent Energy Metabolism in Escherichia coli,” Biki reveals a new type of anaerobic energy metabolism in E. coli in which the cell uses HNQ for mediated electron transfer. When respiring on an anode, the strain demonstrated surprisingly robust anaerobic growth! This paper has it all: genome editing, metabolic modeling, transcriptomics, and electrochemistry. Read about it here.