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SUMMARY:EESS seminar talk on "Connecting electroactivity and prophages in 
 lactic acid bacteria"
DTSTART:20260505T121500
DTEND:20260505T124500
DTSTAMP:20260430T084838Z
UID:2db52363c21177233f77e1aee99497070f04ef1d41cf5e6bdd7aa73f
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Aaron Leininger\, MICROBE\nAbstract:\n\n\nControlling fermenta
 tions with electrodes could allow new process development\, for instance i
 ncreasing rates/yields in a biorefinery or developing new food or agroprod
 ucts. In nature\, diverse primarily-fermentative bacteria encode recently-
 described pathways to exchange electrons with their environment\, suggesti
 ng that electroactivity may be important to understand how primary ferment
 ers perform their piece of the carbon cycle. Despite these pathways\, it
 ’s remained a challenge to use electrodes to alter how mixed microbial c
 ommunities ferment. I show that providing an electrode to the model lactic
  acid bacterium Lactiplantibacillus plantarum can be a two-edged sword: al
 lowing more energetically favorable fermentations but also inducing a prop
 hage which was uninducible by canonical triggers and increasing the lysis 
 rate >10-fold. I’ll connect this finding with prior work by myself and o
 thers on microbiome engineering and discuss current work on how electroact
 ivity and phages contribute to spatial structuring of communities.\n\n\n\n
 \n\nBiography:\n\n\n\nAaron is a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL and the S
 wiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag)\, where h
 e studies and engineers microbial interactions to advance sustainable wate
 r treatment and resource recovery technologies. Following two years of tec
 hnology piloting at DC Water’s Blue Plains facility\, he went on to earn
  his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University\
 , where he worked with Zhiyong Jason Ren to develop new control strategies
  for fermentation and anaerobic digestion processes. He is working with We
 nyu Gu (EPFL) and Martin Ackermann and Olga Schubert (Microbial Systems Ec
 ology\, Eawag) and developing new single-cell methods to study how microbe
 s exchange electrons with each other and with their natural and engineered
  environments.\n\n
LOCATION:GC B1 10 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==GC%20B1%2010 https://epfl.zo
 om.us/j/69011077410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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