Dartmouth Events

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Meeting ID: 954 0076 5810
Passcode: 903624

The rapid diversification of synthetic biology tools holds promise in making some hard-to-solve environmental problems tractable. In this talk, I will discuss problems in the Earth and environmental sciences that could be addressed using engineered living sensors. Such biosensors have the potential to offer new perspectives on open questions, including understanding microbial behaviors in heterogeneous environmental materials like soils, monitoring transient environmental pollutants in wastewater, tracking cryptic element cycling in sediments, and establishing the dynamics of cell-cell interactions in our gut. I will discuss different approaches that we have been taking to develop synthetic biology technologies that function in these environmental settings.

First, I will describe our efforts to overcome biological component limitations by using synthetic electron transfer pathway to study sequence-structure-function relationships in redox proteins. Second, I will describe how we have been using this pathway to engineer synthetic metalloproteins that regulate electron flow post-translationally. Finally, I will present data showing how these electrical switches can been used to build synthetic electron transfer pathways that report on inorganic and organic analytes in environmental samples by switching on extracellular electron transfer. These living electrical sensors, which convert chemical information into electrical information in real time, are expected to be useful as fast sensors in a wide range of complex environments.