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.

Welcome Dr. Xu Zhang to the group as a new postdoc! She recently graduated from Ghent University, Belgium. She worked on electroactive biofilms characterization and applications in Prof. Korneel Rabaey’s group.

So many changes! The group has moved to Rice University. We have new group members to welcome: Sara Molinari, Biki Kundu, Bobby Tesoriero, Matt Carpenter, Swetha Sridhar, and Xu Zhang. This year is going to be an adventure!

A big congratulations to Dr. Sam Light, Lin Su, and Dr. Jose Cornejo! Their groundbreaking work discovers an entirely new mechanism of extracellular electron transfer in firmicutes and is now published in Nature. Check out the paper here and the Nature highlight here.

Congratulations to Chelsea Catania, one of our users from Gui Bazan’s group at UC-Santa Barbara, on her new paper in RSC Advances describing how conjugated oligoelectrolytes improve biocatalysis.