We also characterize cell morphology within ELMs using confocal microscopy and microCT imaging to see our yeast cells 'living' within these hydrated scaffolds.

We’re excited to announce our most recent graduate: 🎊🥳🎉 Dr Kevin Reed! 🎉🥳🎊 He will be working in management consulting at Bain, right here in Austin 🕴

First author, Hongyuan, supplied the plastic samples for degradation himself, saying “the plastic is for the microbes, and the food is for me”. See the degradation of 51 post-consumer plastic products in this figure from the paper published in @Nature

Amino acid substitutions to achieve this enzymatic activity were identified via a 3D self-supervised deep learning network, MutCompute.

Via machine learning-informed enzyme evolution, we designed an enzyme capable of degrading post-consumer PET from 51 different plastic products in as little as 24 hours under moderate conditions.  #pollution #synbio #Engineering Check out this time-lapse of plastic degradation:

See one of our own, Sarah Coleman, and fellow UT ChemE grad student, Miriam Balogun from the Brennecke lab, at the AICHE @ChEnected student recruitment fair in Boston! Meet some great #womeninSTEM and chat with them about our wonderful program! @TexasChE @CockrellSchool

More exciting news! Congratulations Dr. Simon d'Oelsnitz on successfully defending his thesis! His work on developing transcription factor-based biosensors will be continued as he works in the Ellington lab as a post-doc!

We have some big news! Congratulations, Dr. Claire Palmer (@czmarie6) on successfully defending her thesis leveraging Yarrowia lipolytica as a host for type III polyketide synthesis! She’ll be going to U W-Madison for a post doc with the Venturelli lab (@oventurelli2)! 🎉 🥼 🎉

Sierra’s poster rounds out our submissions to #MetabolicEngineering14! Her work on out-of-the lab applications of metabolic engineering can be used for on-demand production of proteins and small molecules in the field (Think SPACE!). Come chat with her! (Poster Group 1, 31)

Emily’s poster focuses on the development of a generalizable microfluidic platform for sorting large microbial libraries for improved production/secretion of small molecules! Come by and ask about this mix-and-match platform (Poster Group 1, 25)