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SUMMARY:IMX Seminar Series - Microbially-driven materials manufacture and 
 responsiveness
DTSTART:20240923T131500
DTEND:20240923T141500
DTSTAMP:20260921T194909Z
UID:30d4d417012cf6cd37c2f5d376447abdd47460f4c136f028994e2081
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Neel Joshi\, Northeastern University\, USA\nThe intersec
 tion between synthetic biology and materials science is an underexplored a
 rea with great potential to positively affect our daily lives\, with appli
 cations ranging from manufacturing to medicine. My group is interested in 
 harnessing the biosynthetic potential of microbes\, not only as factories 
 for the production of raw materials\, but as fabrication plants that can o
 rchestrate the assembly of complex functional materials. We call this appr
 oach “biologically fabricated materials”\, a process whose goal is to 
 genetically program microbes to assemble materials from biomolecular build
 ing blocks without the need for time consuming and expensive purification 
 protocols or specialized equipment. Accordingly\, we have developed Biofil
 m Integrated Nanofiber Display (BIND)\, which relies on the biologically d
 irected assembly of biofilm matrix proteins of the curli system in E. col
 i. We demonstrate that bacterial cells can be programmed to synthesize a r
 ange of functional materials with straightforward genetic engineering tech
 niques. The resulting materials are highly customizable and easy to fabric
 ate\, and we are investigating their use for practical uses ranging from b
 ioremediation and biodegradable bioplastics to engineered therapeutic prob
 iotics.\n\nBio: Neel Joshi is an Associate Professor in the Department of 
 Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University. He completed hi
 s PhD at UC Berkeley in the lab of Matt Francis and a postdoc at Boston Un
 iversity in the lab of Mark Grinstaff before starting his independent acad
 emic career at Harvard University and then moving to Northeastern in 2020.
  He is broadly interested in topics related to biologically inspired mater
 ials\, protein engineering\, self-assembly\, and biointerfaces. His group 
 works at the intersection of biomaterials science and synthetic biology. R
 ecent projects in the group have focused on repurposing bacterial biofilms
  and their matrix proteins for biotechnological and biomedical application
 s.\n 
LOCATION:MXF 1 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==MXF%201
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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