Olivia Suggs has joined our group to work on allosteric protein switches as part of our Bioelectronics research. Olivia has a Bachelors in Biochemistry from Spelman College and is in the Biochemistry and Cell Biology Ph.D. program at Rice. We’re excited to have her on board!

Congratulations Lin, Josh, and Xu on their publication in Nature! This endeavor overcame challenges in biology and material science to create a specific, rapid bioelectronic sensor. With a detection time of minutes, this technology enables real-time monitoring of low concentration contaminants in water before they become irreversible, and is substantially faster and cheaper than fluorescence-based biosensors and liquid chromatography monitoring. To achieve this, the team engineered a synthetic electron transfer chain that pulls in proteins from four different organisms into E. coli, includes a post-translational gate to overcome rate limitations, and encapsulates the cells and electrode in conductive nanomaterials to improve signal to noise ratios. Proof of concept was demonstrated on thiosulfate and the endocrine disruptor 4-hydroxytamoxifen in environmental water samples, but the concept is applicable to a wide array of contaminants. Spanning the labs of Caroline Ajo-Franklin, Joff Silberg, and George Bennett, between Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Rice University, this was truly a collaborative effort (our favorite kind)!

Check out the publication here, as well as Rice U’s write up of the project and the video below!

We’re seeking a collaborative, curious post-doc to join our Biomaterials team. As we’re a very multidisciplinary group, the position is open to those with backgrounds in biochemistry, bioengineering, materials science, microbiology (C. crescentus experience a plus!), molecular biology, or related field. The main qualification is a strong interest in engineered living materials and their applications! Check out the flyer below for more information and contact us.

We’re proud to announce that Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin was one of just six individual faculty to be featured at the inauguration of the eighth Rice University president, Reginald DesRoches. She was selected to represent the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the video below on the engineered living materials research of the Ajo-Franklin lab was shown during the ceremony!

Congratulations to Sara and Bobby for their new publication in Nature Communications! The team achieved autonomous assembly of a centimeter scale living material made up of C. crescentus cells and a secreted protein matrix. This material has genetically tunable physical properties, and is capable of cadmium absorption and enzymatic electron carrier reduction. In addition, it can be grown simply (we tested it out in multiple labs with multiple researchers), be shaped or dried into a hard pellet, and seed new growth.

Check out the publication here.

Learn more about the technology direct from Caroline, Sara, and Bobby in this vid:

At the eighth International Society for Microbial Electrochemistry and Technology (ISMET) conference, Biki Kundu won the prize for Best Poster and Joe Tolar won for Best Oral Presentation! We’re so happy to see their hard work and great science recognized!

Congrats to PhD students Joe Tolar and Siliang Li for their preprint revealing a hybrid extracellular electron transfer mechanism (EET) in Lactiplantibacillus plantarum. In this paper, they discovered that L. plantarum can shift between using quinones or flavins to support EET. Which EET route the cells use depends on L. plantarum‘s access to environmental biomolecules and on the extracellular electron acceptors.

Check it out here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.29.502109v1.full

Congratulations to Swetha for her new publication in ACS Syn Bio: A Framework for the Systematic Selection of Biosensor Chassis for Environmental Synthetic Biology! Swetha lays out the requirements for an microbial biosensor for use in the environment and how to select an appropriate synthetic biology system. Check out the paper here.