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.

Congratulations to Marimikel on getting her first scientific paper published! You can read all about “Transcriptomic analysis of the highly efficient oil-degrading bacterium Acinetobacter venetianus RAG-1 reveals genes important in dodecane uptake and utilization” it here.

Welcome Lin Su to the group! He is a visiting graduate student from Southeast University in Nanjing China, where he worked on bioelectrochemistry of microbes interacting with different nanomaterials.

For the awesome artwork (Annie) and science (Heather, Michaela, and Mark) gracing this month’s cover of ACS Synthetic Biology!