Mike Travisano

Ecology and Environmental Biology
University of Minnesota

Microbial days of future passed

Mike Smanski

Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics
University of Minnesota

Lord of the ring-species

The students and post-docs in my lab work on a group of diverse and seemingly unrelated research and enginering projects.

In this short talk, I will attempt to link them all together in a cohesive way to highlight (i) what we are interested in and (ii) the at-times-serendipitous benefits of a broad research program.

I will talk about soil microbiomes, neuroprotective small molecules, gene drives, sustainable aviation fuel, and glowing carp.

I won’t talk about the weird smell coming out of Gortner 379 (and neither should you; still top secret). This will be a high-level talk, so please ask follow-up questions if you want to hear the details.

THURSDAY  I FEB. 16 I  3:30-4:30 PM CST  I  HYBRID SEMINAR

Burckhard Seelig

Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics
University of Minnesota

Imagine the time before there were proteins

The Seelig group investigates the emergence and early evolution of proteins at the origin of life. 

We apply high-through-put methods of selection and directed evolution to generate artificial proteins that nature has never seen before. Those proteins help us better understand how the first ever proteins could have appeared or how the genetic code may have evolved.

Besides studying these fundamental science questions, we are also interested in applying directed evolution to create enzymes as “designer catalysts” to harness the power of enzymes for the synthesis of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and for biomedical applications.

Bo Hu

Bioproduct & Biosystems Engineering
University of Minnesota

Process development for bioproducts generation & nutrients recycle from agricultural wastes

Nutrients, such as nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and sulfur (S), are vital components for fertilizers and animal feeds, while they are also the major pollutants from rural domestic wastewater and agricultural manure.

Improving utilization efficacy of these nutrients in animal feeds and recycle these nutrient pollutant from rural and agricultural wastes can minimize the environmental impacts of agricultural activities, alleviate the dependency on fossil fuels, and bring benefits to local communities.

Dr. Bo Hu will introduce his research at University of MInnesota related to this area, emphasizing on biomass utilization, industrial fermentation and agricultural waste management. His research group is currently working on projects to improve nutritional value of animal feeds via fungal fermentation, remove phosphorus, nitrogen and sulfur from agricultural waste and sewage sludge via different approaches, including microbial electro-chemical cells and re-design of anaerobic digestion. 

In this presentation, he will explain several case studies in the process development for nutrients removal and recycle.

THURSDAY  I FEB. 9 I  3:30-4:30 PM CST  I  HYBRID SEMINAR

Alptekin Aksan 

Mechanical engineering
University of Minnesota

Design & manufacturing of active biomaterials for biotechnology applications

My research focuses on two interwoven areas: bioencapsulation, and biopreservation. In biopreservation area, I focus on establishing the low-temperature and low-hydration physicochemical transitions of the solution environment on the stability of macromolecules and cells.

In bioencapsulation area, I focus on developing synthetic organic materials for a wide range of applications including bioremediation, biocatalysis, and self-healing materials.

Larry Wackett

Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics
University of Minnesota

Enzymes for PFAS, pesticides, phramaceuticals & pools

The Wackett lab focuses on unconventional enzymes and their real-world implementation. We have discovered the enzymes making b-lactones and biodegrading PFAS, prominent pharmaceutical pollutants, and a water disinfection chemical. I will talk about the biodegradative enzymes, one of which is now being produced at multi-ton scale.

THURSDAY  I FEB. 2 I  3:30-4:30 PM CST  I  HYBRID SEMINAR

Daniel Bond

Plant and Microbial Biology, Microbiology
University of Minnesota

We need to talk about nanowires

For nearly two decades, biological electron transfer research was dominated by the hypothesis that Geobacter pili form conductive nanowires. Cryo-electron microscopy has now revealed their structure. Not everybody is happy.

Jeff Gralnick

Plant and Microbial Biology
University of Minnesota

Shewanella– You don’t know the power of the dark side

Shewanella is an environmental bacterium capable of breathing more compounds than any other organism identified on Earth. Many of these substrates are found naturally in insoluble oxide minerals, meaning they must take electrons from central metabolism and move them outside the cell. 

Here I will describe surprising functions for extracellular electron transfer proteins in what might be a respiration over-drive system and a multiheme cytochrome that is a receptor for bacteriophage.

THURSDAY  I  JAN. 26 I  3:30-4:30 PM CST  I  HYBRID SEMINAR

Keith Hengen

Assistant Professor of Biology
Washington University

Circuit-specific flickering of sleep & wake predicts natural behaviors: the minimal unit of brain sleep

Sleep and wake are understood to be slow, long-lasting processes that span the entire brain. The possibility that local circuits throughout the brain might routinely and independently switch between sleep and wake has been difficult to address due to reliance on surface measurements of brain rhythms to classify state.

By recording high resolution neural activity across diverse regions of the murine brain for 24 h, we learn reliable rules of sleep/wake embedding in each circuit at the scale of 100 microseconds and 100 microns, a 7 order of magnitude improvement in resolution over standard approaches.

We show that diverse microcircuits regularly switch between sleep-like and wake-like states (flickers), independent of the rest of the brain and the arousal state of the animal. Furthermore, high sleep pressure suppresses wake flickers within sleep, but does not modulate sleep flickers during wake. In contrast, sleep flickers during complex, natural behavior results in a momentary pause of movement.

Our results reveal that sleep and wake arise from an unstable patchwork of states throughout the brain.

THURSDAY  I  DEC. 8 I  3:30-4:30 PM CST  I  HYBRID SEMINAR

Katherine Davis

Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Physics graduate Program member
Emory College

Structural insights into the biosynthesis and bioactivity of natural products

Natural products provide a powerful foundation from which to develop novel therapeutics. Despite their utility, our understanding of both their biosynthesis and mechanisms of action are often incomplete, due in part to the scarcity of structural data depicting their interactions with associated bio-synthetic enzymes and/or targets.

Ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs), for example, are a diverse class of bioactive peptides whose simple biosynthetic pathways make them attractive for bio-engineering efforts. However, the structural basis for substrate recognition and recruitment by their respective tailoring enzymes remains unclear. Hydroxyalkylquinolines (HAQs), by contrast, have been studied extensively for their marked antimicrobial activity, yet insights into the origin of this activity are limited.

In this talk, I will present X-ray crystallographic data and computational modeling studies that elucidate the structure and dynamics of associated enzyme-ligand interactions. In particu-
lar, our results provide new insights into the role of a putative substrate-
binding domain associated with RiPP-biosynthesis via study of the radical S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) enzyme, SuiB, and confirm the hypothesis that competition with the co-substrate ubiquinone is the basis for dihydroorotate dehydrogenase inhibition by bacterial HAQs.

THURSDAY  I  NOV. 10  I  3:30-4:30 PM CST  I  HYBRID SEMINAR