Chemical Biochemical Environmental Engineering Department Presents: 

Dr. Nicholas Sandoval

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware 

Friday, February 5

10:00AM

Commons 329, UMBC

Biography

Nicholas R. Sandoval is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware in the Papoutsakis research group. He graduated with his B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2006 from the University of Colorado Boulder.  He earned his Ph.D. in 2011 at the University of Colorado Boulder in Ryan Gill’s research group with support from an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. There he investigated mechanisms of lignocellulosic hydrolysate tolerance in E. coli using genome engineering methods. Dr. Sandoval then lectured the following academic year in the Colorado Mesa University/University of Colorado Mechanical Engineering Partnership Program in Grand Junction, Colorado. This was followed by his current postdoctoral research at the University of Delaware with support from an NIH National Research Service Award. There he currently studies genome engineering of anaerobic solventogenic bacteria among other projects.

Abstract

"Expanding the Genome Engineering Toolkit: From Genes to Metagenomes"

Microorganisms are powerful chemical catalysts with applications in human health, the environment, and in industry. Directed evolution is a powerful strategy in which genetic diversity is initially generated (from the gene to genome level) and then desired traits are selected or screened for. Engineering microorganisms for improved characteristics (e.g. productivity, yield, inhibitor tolerance) has a long and rich history. Now sequencing and synthesis of DNA are increasingly affordable, making genome engineering and analysis quicker and cheaper than ever before. The broad potential of directed evolution in light of these advances is enormous. The question now turns to what/why/how genetic constructs need to be made and explored for a biotechnologically relevant outcome.

This talk will describe multiple efforts of creating and exploring genetic diversity for the purposes of elucidating tolerance mechanisms of feedstock and product inhibition in the model organism E. coli, the solventogen C. pasteurianum, and the metagenome. In one example, two different lambda-red mediated recombination tools were used to first perform a genome-wide search to identify single mutants of interest, and then target a small subset of genes for further exploration of multiplexed mutations. It was shown that interactions between individual mutations are not trivial and can have a large effect on approaches to directed genome engineering. Another example will describe engineering the transcription machinery of E. coli to recognize heterologous promoters for the effective expansion of the metagenomic search space.