Bio-Catalysis

New Frontiers Grant Program Successes for RASEI Fellows

Anonymous — Wed, 08 May 2024 20:48:10 +0000

New Frontiers Grant Program Successes for RASEI Fellows Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/08/2024 - 14:48

Daniel Morton

The CU Boulder New Frontiers Grant Program was launched in 2024. The program is designed to foster visionary groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects that have potential for high impact. This could include significant advances in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that can build to new paradigms of understanding.

New Frontiers Grant Program

2024 Award Announcement

A central column of this program is to stimulate the development of new strengths at CU Boulder, driven by researchers thinking across disciplines and developing methods to work together to tackle complex and impactful research challenges.

Twenty-six teams submitted collaborative proposals were submitted to this program earlier this year and four projects were selected as winners of planning grants, two of which involved RASEI Fellows.

New Frontiers in Bio-Integrated Organic Computing & Low-Energy Innovative Carbon-based Manufacturing, or BIO-CLIC, led by RASEI Fellow Jeff Cameron and engaging a team across four CU Boulder departments and collaborators from NREL, will explore challenges in computational efficiency by investigating unconventional computing approaches that employ renewable sources and carbon fixation processes.

Polymers for a Sustainable Earth, or POSE, led by Wei Zhang from the Department of Chemistry and involving RASEI Fellows Dan Kaffine, Kat Knauer, Oana Luca, Seth Marder, Srinivas Parinandi, Mike Toney, and Terri Walters, brings together collaborators from six CU Boulder departments and NREL. POSE will foster a community to facilitate extramural research and funding at a scale to effectively address the issue of plastic pollution and new, sustainable methods to synthesize, reuse, and recycle polymers.

The four teams were chosen following 14 in-person pitches, where the teams outlined how their proposed work addresses important societal problems through adopting collaborative interdisciplinary approaches. The four teams will now use the next year to advance their proposals, build out the team and conduct initial investigations on how to take things forward. The teams will then compete for the single Launch Phase Grant of $200k, which will be awarded in June 2025.

Congratulations to the teams! We look forward to seeing your progress over the next year!

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Bacterial Disco Lights: Using light to control the movement and arrangement of cyanobacteria to form liquid crystalline active matter

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Bacterial Disco Lights: Using light to control the movement and arrangement of cyanobacteria to form liquid crystalline active matter Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/02/2024 - 00:00

Daniel Morton

Read the Article

This collaboration, between a bacterial biochemist and a condensed-matter physicist, use light to control the movement and arrangement of cyanobacteria, forming two- and three-dimensional nematic liquid crystalline states that could provide significant opportunities to regulate the behavior of the bacterial systems and open up new areas in bio-manufacturing that use carbon dioxide as the feedstock for the production of oxygen, biofuels, or biomaterials.

Cyanobacteria are one of the most ancient forms of life, dating back to ~3.5 billion years ago. Highly abundant, these bacterial dinosaurs use carbon dioxide and light as inputs and convert them to energy, motion, and oxygen. The term ‘Active Matter’ is used to describe systems that take in and dissipate energy at the level of constituent particles and, in the process, perform systematic movements. Essentially all forms of life can be considered active matter. Injecting energy into an active matter system often leads to emergent collective phenomena, think flocks of birds or schools of fish. Though there has been extensive research on the photosynthetic action of cyanobacteria, quantitative exploration of the motion, arrangement, and potential collective behavior of cyanobacteria is relatively unexplored. Intrigued by exploring these phenomena further, two RASEI Fellows formed an unusual partnership to investigate.

In 2018 RASEI Fellows Jeff Cameron and Ivan Smalyukh were awarded a grant from the DOE to build a specialized microscope system for imaging photosynthetic microbes. The system includes an ultrafast laser system that enable multi-photon excitation in the pigments in the cyanobacterial cells, a technique that was essential for this investigation. Cameron, a member of the Department of Biochemistry, is an expert in cyanobacteria and photosynthesis, while Smalyukh, a member of the Department of Physics, is an expert in condensed matter physics, with a specialty in liquid crystals. The unusual nature of this partnership is not lost on them. “Normally Biochemistry and Physics are separated, making close collaboration difficult” explains Cameron, “especially when close experimental collaboration is needed, requiring routine access to environmental chambers and biological research labs as well as advanced laser labs”. A key feature in how RASEI is setup is the co-location of multidisciplinary researchers. Cameron notes “This enables researchers to work hand-in-hand on studies that would simply not be possible if the two labs were on opposite sides of campus”.

Working together the findings from this team were conclusive; the cyanobacteria danced to the light! When a localized light was introduced to the bacteria, they harvested energy from the light through photosynthesis and used the energy generated to move towards the light. Experiments were done in two modes, one where the bacteria were confined to a two-dimensional plane, and the second where they could move in three-dimensions. In the two-dimensional system as the density of bacteria in the colony increased in the illuminated area emergent collective behavior emerged, with the bacteria forming a nematic arrangement, similar to that observed in synthetic liquid crystals. This emergent behavior was found to develop dramatically over time, with the direction, orientation, and trajectory of the cyanobacteria all changing, thought to be driven by an optimization toward enhanced light energy intake. Expanding this to the three-dimensional studies the team found that the cyanobacteria stacked on top of each other to form 3D active nematic slabs. The specialized microscope system enabled the teams to effectively explore these three-dimensional structures, even looking at cross-sectional views of the emergent behaviors. Comprehensive studies explored a range of properties of these emergent ‘Flocks of Cyanobacteria’, including examining transitions between fluid and gel states, the impacts of introducing defects, interactions between polydomain systems, and movement around foreign objects.

Precise control of biological systems is the ‘holy grail’ in biomanufacturing. Spatial patterning of the cyanobacteria impacts the structural and functional properties of the bacteria. Cyanobacteria only require carbon dioxide, water, and light, and can produce biofuels, commodity chemicals, and minerals, all while pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and producing oxygen. Understanding, and more importantly being able to reliably control, the optimal conditions for these bio-manufacturing to operate has the potential to enable new avenues to utilize these biological systems in benefiting society and the environment.

Armed with an enhanced understanding of how these bacteria move and can be controlled by light, the team is excited by the possibilities. Smalyukh explains “Our discovery of out-of-equilibrium active matter phase transitions in filamentous cyanobacteria systems may find utility in commanding collective behavior of cyanobacteria, with potential biotechnological utility ranging from control of bacterial mats and blooms, to oxygen generation an inhibition of toxin production”. Cameron adds “the possibilities are endless-once we can control the growth and orientation of biology, we can create novel materials and start to think about entirely new, environmentally-friendly, biomanufacturing opportunities.”

There is something poignant when you consider employing these ancient lifeforms, that were responsible for the Great Oxidation Event, profoundly changing life as we know it, as active agents in pulling carbon dioxide, the key causative greenhouse gas in the climate crisis, out of our atmosphere. The understanding and control made possible through the investigations described here bring this one step closer.

NATURE COMMUNICATIONS MATERIALS, 2024, 5, 37

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Photosynthetically-powered phototactic active nematic liquid crystal fluids and gels

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Photosynthetically-powered phototactic active nematic liquid crystal fluids and gels Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/15/2024 - 00:00

NATURE COMMUNICATIONS MATERIALS, 2024, 5, 37

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Risk Assessment of Industrial Microbes Using a Terrestrial Mesocosm Platform

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Risk Assessment of Industrial Microbes Using a Terrestrial Mesocosm Platform Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/11/2023 - 00:00

MICROBIAL ECOLOGY, 2024, 87, 12

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Deep mutational scanning reveals the molecular determinants of RNA polymerase-mediated adaptation and tradeoffs

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Deep mutational scanning reveals the molecular determinants of RNA polymerase-mediated adaptation and tradeoffs Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/09/2023 - 00:00

NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 2023, 14, 6319

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Cryo-annealing of Photoreduced CdS Quantum Dot–Nitrogenase MoFe Protein Complexes Reveals the Kinetic Stability of the E4(2N2H) Intermediate

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Cryo-annealing of Photoreduced CdS Quantum Dot–Nitrogenase MoFe Protein Complexes Reveals the Kinetic Stability of the E4(2N2H) Intermediate Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/20/2023 - 00:00

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY, 2023, 145, 39, 21165-21169

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How to build a climate-friendly skyscraper: Start small. Petri-dish small

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 06:00:00 +0000

How to build a climate-friendly skyscraper: Start small. Petri-dish small Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/14/2023 - 00:00

Prometheus Materials, co-founded by RASEI Fellow Jeff Cameron, has a solution for replacing one of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gasses, financial backing from Microsoft and an aggressive plan to scale up quickly.

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Heterologous expression of formate dehydrogenase enables photoformatotrophy in the emerging model microalga, Picochlorum renovo

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Heterologous expression of formate dehydrogenase enables photoformatotrophy in the emerging model microalga, Picochlorum renovo Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/29/2023 - 00:00

FRONTIERS IN BIOENGINEERING AND BIOTECHNOLOGY, 2023, 295, 6570-6585

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Hydrogel-assisted self-healing of biomineralized living building materials

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Hydrogel-assisted self-healing of biomineralized living building materials Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/25/2023 - 00:00

JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION, 2023, 418, 138178

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Asymmetric survival in single-cell lineages of cyanobacteria in response to photodamage

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Asymmetric survival in single-cell lineages of cyanobacteria in response to photodamage Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/30/2022 - 00:00

Photosynthesis Research, 2023, 155, 289-297

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