In a free public seminar at 3:30 PM on November 6, in room 1115 of the Wisconsin Energy Institute, UW–Madison  professor of chemical and biological engineering Brian Pfleger will give a talk on sustainability and synthetic biology.

Finding a sustainable alternative for today’s petrochemical industry is a major challenge facing chemical engineers and society at large. To be sustainable, routes for converting carbon dioxide and light into organic compounds for use as both fuels and chemical building blocks must be identified, understood, and engineered. Advances in synthetic biology and other biological engineering disciplines have expanded the scope of what can be produced in a living organism. As in other engineering disciplines, synthetic biologists want to apply a general understanding of science (e.g. biology and biochemistry) to construct complex systems from well-characterized parts (e.g. DNA and protein). Once novel synthetic biological systems (e.g. enzymes for biofuel synthesis) are constructed, they must be engineered to function inside evolving cells without negatively impacting the host’s physiology. In most cases first generation systems fail to meet this goal. Many groups use systems biology tools to identify metabolic, regulatory, and/or physiological barriers which often can be overcome with metabolic engineering strategies. A major challenge to implementing these strategies is controlling the abundance of system proteins at optimal levels, but many novel techniques have been developed to accelerate the optimization process. In this talk, I will describe the history of synthetic biology, why it has expanded rapidly over the past few decades, and how it has been used to implement a Design, Build, Test, Learn cycle to address barriers to biofuel production. In addition, I will discuss the current opportunities and strategies for using biology to produce fuels and chemicals. I recommend reading a recent review by Dr. Jay Keasling’s group in ACS Synthetic Biology entitled, “From Fields to Fuels: Recent Advances in the Microbial Production of Biofuels” for additional background reading.