Engineering Commons^™

Rapid Design, Construction, And Validation Of Synthetic Metabolic Pathways In A Modular Escherichia Coli (Chassis) Cell, Jong-Won Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Current strain development has been hindered by the vast biochemical space in nature. The concept of modular cell design has been invented to enable rapid and predictable construction of multiple optimal production strains for efficient production of a large variety of biochemicals with minimal experimental effort. While modular cell design principles have been successfully validated in some cases, its development is still limited by the small library of the production modules demonstrated.

The goals of this thesis are i) to establish a framework for rapid design, construction, and validation of production modules to explore a large space of molecules (e.g., …

Approaches To Studying Bacterial Biofilms In The Bioeconomy With Nanofabrication Techniques And Engineered Platforms., Michelle Caroline Halsted

Doctoral Dissertations

Studies that estimate more than 90% of bacteria subsist in a biofilm state to survive environmental stressors. These biofilms persist on man-made and natural surfaces, and examples of the rich biofilm diversity extends from the roots of bioenergy crops to electroactive biofilms in bioelectrochemical reactors. Efforts to optimize microbial systems in the bioeconomy will benefit from an improved fundamental understanding of bacterial biofilms. An understanding of these microbial systems shows promise to increase crop yields with precision agriculture (e.g. biosynthetic fertilizer, microbial pesticides, and soil remediation) and increase commodity production yields in bioreactors. Yet conventional laboratory methods investigate these micron-scale …

Lithium Recovery Process From Spent Batteries, Nicholas A. Ross, Lacey Roberts, Jordan Leith, Woodi Woodland

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Protein Engineering Potential Inhibitor Of Detrimental Immune Responses, Nathaniel L. Blalock, Eric T. Boder, Liang Fang

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

On the surface of immune cells, class II major histocompatibility complex proteins (MHCII) present antigenic peptides for CD4+ T cell recognition, which initiate a variety of antigen-specific immune responses such as antibody response or cytotoxic T cell activation. In people with with auto-immune diseases including but not limited to type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, detrimental immune responses occur after the presentation of antigenic peptides. A single-chain, minimal MHCII (scm-MHCII) has been designed to retain its function as an antigen-presenting protein with a simplified structure that can be easily produced and manipulated in a laboratory by recombinant microbial …