(340ac) Peroxisome Engineering in the Oleaginous Yeast Yarrowia Lipolytica and Expansions on Lessons Learned

My graduate work focused on engineering an oleaginous yeast, a natural accumulator of lipids, to instead effectively accumulate a fully synthetic biopolymer, polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), which is native to some species of bacteria. While challenging, these efforts allowed me to discover my interest in heterologous expression, pathway engineering, organelle engineering, bioinformatics, and a host of analytical and synthetic biology techniques. Cumulatively, this broad toolkit has lead me toward an interest in pursuing pioneering research projects.

Research Interests:

Bioinformatic analysis has already established itself as a necessary tool for both exploratory and goal-oriented research. Having seen first hand the utility and flexibility of the technique, I am interested in incorporating bioinformatics and broader computational methods, such as genome-scale models and molecular modeling, into earlier phases of problem solving and planning.

The exploitation of native intermediates to shorten pathway engineering for heterologous product production is another interest. Many development pipelines often seek to make use of existing biological chassis for production of a new product. While this has been shown to be an effective strategy, it suffers from being limited to the capabilities of the host organism. By focusing on identifying alternative hosts with metabolisms more amenable to the end use case, significant effort can be saved in the long term.

This leads to the importance of, and my interest in, effective tool development. While there are many interesting products that can be made, development of the techniques to effectively make said products can teach us more about the system and lead to more effective and efficient production of future compounds of interest. The ability to adapt proven tools to a new host may possibly allow for production improvements, but will almost certainly lead to the expansion of knowledge in said organism, facilitating rapid future engineering efforts.

With such a diverse landscape of tools, techniques, and knowledge, multi-disciplinary teams are critical for effective research. As such, I believe a conscious effort is needed to build a team that represents the relevant fields with significant, dedicated expertise at the outset of a project. To do so, gaining broad knowledge of multiple fields is required, and also happens to be an activity that I find enjoyable.

Finally, my chemical engineering background leads me to recognize that, at the end of the day, all of these molecular biology efforts must be energetically efficient for their intended downstream applications and viable to implement at a commercial scale. By keeping the end goal in mind and recognizing, and respecting, the limits of thermodynamics, I believe more effective design and development strategies can be made further upstream in the research pipeline.