Prof. Claudia Schmidt-Dannert
Biochemistry Molecular Biology & Biophysics
274 Gortner Lab
1479 Gortner Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55108-6106
612-625-5782
schmi232@umn.edu
140 Gortner Labs
1479 Gortner Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55108-6106
612-624-6774
612-625-5780 FAX
bti@umn.edu
Our Alumni Network, are a key resource for career insights and planning, and for professional development and networking. Our alumni regularly return to share their insight in different areas, including their experiences in career development and in balancing career and family. In our last winter retreat at the Itasca Biological Station, two alumni (Katie and Aaron Wlaschin) and their young children spent one weekend with our trainees.
The successes of our training grant alumni in their academic and industrial positions serve as the best examples for potential career trajectories in biotechnology for our current trainees. Importantly, our program has created a large appreciative and supportive group of alumni. Every alumnus who has received a request to speak at our training grant Alumni Symposium responded favorably. Our past trainees, of whom the vast majority joined the industrial sector, serve as an informal job referral group for our graduating trainees; our program routinely receives information on entry-level job opening for PhDs from many companies.
Industry3M |
AcademiaBethel University GovernmentDepartment of Defense |
Our training program and its faculty are committed to provide an inclusive and accommodating environment for all students regardless of background or disability. The contributions of scientists whose backgrounds encompass diversity in culture, disability, ethnicity, gender, and economic background are vital to a healthy and constructive research environment. Incorporating diversity in our community, curriculum and research is essential for improving the health and knowledge of all, especially those from historically under-represented and disadvantaged groups.
As a part of this strategy, we strive to provide a learning environment that supports all of our students during their training. We partner with the Office for Diversity in Graduate Education, the Disability Resource Center (DRC), and the University of Minnesota’s Office for Equity and Diversity (OED) to offer resources for our trainees.
Many of our training grant faculty work with the DRC to accommodate students with disabilities in our classrooms. This may include providing a separate testing and exam taking environment and allowing extra time for exams and tests, conversion of documents, or note taking assistance. All classrooms are wheel chair accessible and every effort will be made to accommodate students with disabilities in our classrooms. UM class syllabi include a statement that instructors are willing to provide reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities and ask student to contact the DRC and register with DRC to access resources provided by the UM.
To further strengthen education and training of our faculty on resources offered by the DRC and train them in Best Practices/Universal Design for Instruction (https://diversity.umn.edu/disability/), we will reach out to the DRC and OED to organize training faculty meetings with resource/outreach staff from the DRC and identify 2-3 hr workshops offered by the OED (https://diversity.umn.edu/workshopsandtrainings) to be taken by training faculty and interested students.
Following a visit to Minnesota by three Japanese graduate students from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), a group of four Minnesota graduate students from the BioTechnology Institute (BTI) visited Japan in mid-October. Chris Flynn, Grayson Wawrzyn, Jessica Eichmiller and Maria Rebolleda-Gomez were graciously hosted by their NAIST counterparts on a 3-week trip that completed the 15th exchange in a program organized by former BTI Director, Ken Valentas in 1996.
The 15th BTI-NAIST exchange featured a symposium on progress in microbial biotechnology, enzyme engineering and systems biology – and a five-year renewal of the agreement that created the program.
Since its conception, the exchange has successfully connected graduate students from one institution to research groups in the other based on common interests with the intent of learning new skills and techniques. Students from the host laboratory also become cultural mentors for the visitors. Lasting professional and personal bonds are forged in the process, sometimes resulting in collaborative research initiatives.
“I think that my favorite part of Japan,” commented Grayson Wawrzyn, “was learning to be part of a culture so strikingly different from our own.”
Wawrzyn, a graduate student researcher in the lab of Claudia Schmidt-Dannert, was assigned to Takashi Hashimoto’s laboratory and worked with one of his students to help characterize some of the enzymes involved in nicotine biosynthesis in tobacco plants.
Other members of the BTI group participated in equally compelling genomic research projects. Eichmiller studied novel intracellular proline transporters and tested the stress tolerance of mutant yeast strains in the lab of Hiroshi Takagi. Rebolleda-Gomez was introduced to systems biology in the study of bacterial genomics while in the lab of Hirotada Mori. And Flynn learned how cells repair damaged DNA while in the Maki lab.
For Japanese lab members who are required to present their lab work in English each week, working with the exchange group from BTI was an opportunity to practice speaking scientific English.
Living and working together, lab groups also had fun together. Several of the Japanese labs had their own baseball teams, and the last week of the exchange featured ‘lab Olympics day’ where Japanese lab members dressed in super hero outfits competed for fun in a series of relay races.
In addition to experiencing traditional Japanese foods like sushi and okinomiyaki, BTI exchange members also experienced the cultural environment in trips to local shrines around Nara and the old hilltop estates in Arishiyama near Kyoto. The highlight of their cultural experience was a 4-day holiday break that brought most of the group to Tokyo before members went their separate ways. Wawrzyn and Rebolleda-Gomez explored Tokyo further while Eichmiller visited a Japanese friend and Flynn and his wife toured a world heritage shrine and marveled at the beauty of the ponds and cascading waterfalls of Chuzenji in Nikko.
“The hospitality of our hosts was superb,” concluded Flynn. “Everyone was super friendly.”
Added Eichmiller, “an unexpected benefit of the trip to Japan is that I can better relate to my Japanese colleagues at the University.”
by Tim Montgomery
Janice Frias, Katherine Volzing, Chad Satori and Josh Ochocki visited Japan this past November as part of the BioTechnology Institute’s ongoing exchange program with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST). They travelled to Japan with returning exchange students from NAIST whom they had previously hosted at BTI.
Exciting cultural experiences complemented the students’ lab work at NAIST, beginning with an informal welcome party where dried squid “candy” was served. The BTI group stayed on-campus in guest houses, were chaperoned to various tourist and cultural attractions and experienced new food and pastimes – from a hearty noodle meal of hiroshimayaki to a traditional foot bath where fish nibbled the dirt particles off their toes.
Katherine Volzing visited the ginza, a high style shopping district in Tokyo, and was invited to breakfast with a family in the Tsukiji Fish Market where they served her raw tuna on a stick.
“It looked yucky,” she confessed, “but it was the best thing I ever ate.”
Cultural excursions included time spent at the Todai-ji Temple in Nara; the Kiyomizu Temple, Sanjeusangen-do Temple Garden and Ginkaku-ji Gardens in Kyoto; the Floating Torii at Miyajima; Himeji Castle, and aboard the 200 mph Shinkansen or “bullet train” while in transit. But the exchange group from BTI also accomplished quite a bit in their lab work.
“Professor Takagi said we were the best working group ever,” exclaimed Chad Satori proudly. Satori was excited to work with cell transfections and binding assays in the Sato lab in a change of pace from his mostly analytical work under Edgar Arriaga at BTI.
Janice Frias, who has worked to synthesize biohydrocarbons in the Wackett lab at BTI, was assigned to the lab of NAIST exchange coordinator Hiroshi Takagi, Professor of Cell Biotechnology specializing in applied microbiology and protein engineering. Frias assisted in Takagi’s work with stress tolerance in yeast as an element in improving industrial fermentation in the production of bioethanol.
Frias, Satori and the other members of the exchange group from BTI each found their assignments while at NAIST to be rewarding. Distefano lab member Josh Ochocki was introduced to the work of Professor Kinichi Nakashima exploring neuron stem cells and how they develop into different types of brain cells. And Katherine Volzing found her experience in the lab of Ko Kato examining differentiation in gene expression in stem cells extracted from mice to be a change of pace from her statistical and computational modeling in the Kaznessis lab at BTI. All were impressed with the professionalism as well as the aggressive English requirements of their Japanese counterparts.
“They’re required to put together and present their lab work and plate results in English each week,” explained Janice Frias in amazement.
“The labs were impeccably clean,” concluded Chad Satori. “And everyone was very professional and kind.”
Subcellular Analysis, Mitochondria, Doxorubicin Metabolism
Engineering the Cell Microenvironment, Regulation of Cellular Dormancy and Activation, Stem Cell-based models of Barrier Function
Computational Biomechanics and Transport
Metabolic Control and Regulation in Adipocytes, Obesity/Insulin Action, Lipid Metabolism, Protein-lipid Association, Lipid Oxidation, Proteomics
Bacterial Communication Mechanisms and Antibiotics. Advancing the Analysis of Biological Systems, Designing and Synthesizing Molecules.
Physiology of Anaerobes, Electricity Generation by Electrode-attached Bacteria
Microfluidics, DNA Technologies, Biophysics
Cell-cell Communication and Gene Regulation in Bacteria, Novel RNA Regulators of Gene Expression, Genetic Determinants of Biofilm Formation
Cellular phosphate uptake and bacterial virulence, Molecular engineering of enzymes and biotechnological applications
Physiology and synthetic biology of environmental bacteria
Proteomics, Mass Spectrometry, Bioinformatics
Engineering Principles Applied to Chemistry, Biology, and Physiology. Disease Detection, Non-invasive in Vivo Molecular Imaging of Tumors
Analytical chemistry, chemical biology, materials chemistry, environmental chemistry, chemical physics
Plant Metabolomics
Genomic Cell Engineering, Tissue Engineering, Bioreaction Engineering
Bioinformatics, Parallel Computing, Data Mining
Systems Biology of Plant Disease Resistance
Enantioselective Synthesis, Protein Engineering, Catalytic Plasticity, Evolution of Enzymes, Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry
Computational biology, bioinformatics, statistical mechanics, protein fold recognition, antimicrobial peptides, multiscale modeling
DNA Nanotechnology, Biomolecular Engineering, Targeted Drug & Gene Delivery, Peptide Hydrogels, Biopolymers
Oxygenase Mechanisms, Metalloproteins, Magnetic Resonance Techniques, Kinetics
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Molecular Genetics of Development, Growth Factor Signaling, Gene Regulation
Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering
Protein Engineering for Chemical Modulation of Transcription Factor Function
Biocatalysis/Biodegradation of Chlorocarbon Compounds, Bioremediation, Plant-microbe Interactions with Bradurhizobiujm and Rhizobium, Ecophysiology of E. coli, Methods to Determine Sources of Bacteria in the Environment
Biomolecular Engineering, Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology
Metabolic Pathway Engineering, Combinatorial Biosynthesis, Directed Evolution, Natural Products
Protein Engineering, Cellular Engineering
Biocatalysis, Directed Evolution, Protein Engineering, Artificial Enzymes
Microenvironments, Cell-environment Interactions, Biomolecular Engineering
Synthetic Biology, Natural Product Biosynthesis, Engineering Multigene Systems
Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering, Neural Tissue Engineering
Plant Genome Engineering Through Homologous Recombination; Retrotransposable Elements and Genome Organization
Biodegradation, Microbial Genomics, Metabolic Engineering
Biomaterials, Nonviral Delivery of Genes and Vaccines, Tissue Engineering
Principles of Chemistry, Biology and Engineering to Achieve Biosynthesis Beyond Nature
Voytas (Lead), Dunny, Wei-Shou Hu, Katagiri , Myers, O’Connor, Smanski
This group will give our trainees instructions in genome engineering, computational analysis and visualization of biological interaction networks.
Haynes (Lead), Arriaga, Bernlohr, Distefano,Griffin, Hegeman, John D. Lipscomb, Will Pomerantz, Dan Knights, Daniel Schmidt
Trainees will receive instruction from these trainers in omics approaches and the application of cutting-edge probes and tools.
Burckhard Seelig (Lead), Samira Azarin, Erin Carlson, Mikael Elias, Ben Hackel, Romas Kazlauskas, Yiannis Kaznessis, Efrosini Kokkoli, Casim Sarkar, Claudia Schmidt-Dannert
Trainers in this group are interested in the discovery and design of new protein and metabolic pathways with the goal of generating new cellular or protein functions for biotechnological applications. They use synthetic biology and computational design methods to create emergent functions. They combine molecular engineering strategies with computational design, thereby exposing trainees to quantitative and rational molecular design.
Brenda Ogle (Lead), Victor Barocas, Kevin Dorfman, Jeffrey A. Gralnick, George Karypis, Michael J. Sadowsky, Wei Shen, Robert T. Tranquillo, Lawrence P. Wackett, Chun Wang, Kechun Zhang
This group of faculty is experienced at implementing scientific discoveries and developments into applied technologies and products. They will expose trainees to aspects lof entrepreneurship and innovation.
Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering
Engineering of biomaterials and cellular microenvironments, cell-environment interactions, biomolecular engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering of biomaterials and cellular microenvironments, cell-environment interactions, biomolecular engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Cardiovacular tissue engineering, neural tissue engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Biomaterials, non-viral delivery of genes and vaccines, tissue engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Ocular biomechanics and transport, tissue- equivalent mechanics, microelectromechanical systems
BMBB
Metabolic control and regulation in adipocytes, obesity/insulin action, lipid metabolism, protein- lipid association, lipid oxidation, proteomics
BMBB
Proteomics, mass spectrometry, bioinformatics
BMBB
Oxygenase mechanisms, metalloproteins, magnetic resonance techniques, kinetics
BMBB, BTI
Enantioselective synthesis, protein engineering, catalytic plasticity, evolution of enzymes, dynamic combinatorial chemistry
BMBB
Biological networks that coordinate metabolism and growth
BMBB; BTI
Metabolic pathway engineering, combinatorial biosynthesis, directed evolution, natural products
BMBB; BTI
Biocatalysis, directed evolution, protein engineering, artificial enzymes
BMBB; BTI
Biodegradation, microbial genomics, metabolic engineering
BMBB
Targeted protein degradation; Protein quality control; NMR spectroscopy
Microbiology; BTI
Physiology of anaerobes, electricity generation by electrode-attached bacteria
Chemistry; BTI
Protein engineering, biocatalysis, protein chemistry, enzymology, organic synthesis, protein prenylation
Microbiology; BTI
Physiology and genetic engineering of environmental bacteria
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.; BTI
Genomic cell engineering, tissue engineering, bioreaction engineering
BMBB, BTI
Enantioselective synthesis, protein engineering, catalytic plasticity, evolution of enzymes, dynamic combinatorial chemistry
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.; BTI
Computational biology, bioinformatics, statistical mechanics, protein fold recognition, antimicrobial peptides, multi-scale modeling
Soil, Water and Climate; BTI
Biocatalysis/biodegradation of chlorocarbon compounds, bioremediation, plant-microbe interactions with bradurhizobiujm and rhizobium, exophysiology of E. coli, methods to determine sources of bacteria in the environment
BMBB; BTI
Metabolic pathway engineering, combinatorial biosynthesis, directed evolution, natural products
BMBB; BTI
Biocatalysis, Directed Evolution, Protein Engineering, Artificial Enzymes
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.; BTI
Population dynamics and biopolymers
BMBB; BTI
Biodegradation, microbial genomics, metabolic engineering
Chemistry
Subcellular analysis, mitochondria, doxorubicin metabolism
Chemistry
Bacterial communication mechanisms and antibiotics
Chemistry; BTI
Protein engineering, biocatalysis, protein chemistry, enzymology, organic synthesis, protein prenylation
Chemistry
Analytical chemistry, chemical biology, materials chemistry, environmental chemistry, chemical physics
Chemistry
Protein engineering for chemical modulation of transcription factor function
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.
Microfluidics, DNA electrophoresis, biophysics
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.
Molecular imaging, engineering proteins, tumor targeting
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.; BTI
Genomic cell engineering, tissue engineering, bioreaction engineering
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.; BTI
Computational biology, bioinformatics, statistical mechanics, protein fold recognition, antimicrobial peptides, multi-scale modeling
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.
Biotechnology and bioengineering polymers
Chemical Eng. & Mats. Sci.; BTI
Population dynamics and biopolymers
Chemical Engineering & Mats. Sci.
Principles of chemistry, biology, and engineering to achieve biosynthesis beyond nature
Computer Science and Engineering
Bioinformatics, parallel computing, data mining
Computer Science and Engineering
Computational biology
Computer Science and Engineering
Machine learning methods for integrating large- scale genomic datasets to understand gene function and biological networks
Genetics, Cell Biology and Development
Morphogenesis, cell cycle, chromosome function and genomic structure in yeasts
Genetics, Cell Biology and Development
Gene therapy for genetic diseases and cancer
Genetics, Cell Biology and Development
Molecular genetics of development, growth factor signaling, gene regulation
Genetics, Cell Biology and Development
Protein engineering, cellular engineering
Genetics, Cell Biology and Development
Plant genome engineering through homologous recombination; Retrotransposable elements and genome organization
Horticultural Science
Plant metabolomics
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Logic synthesis and synthetic biology
Mathematics
Modeling of complex systems, mathematical biology, morphogenesis
Microbiology; BTI
Physiology of anaerobes, electricity generation by electrode-attached bacteria
Microbiology
Cell-cell communication and gene regulation in bacteria, novel RNA regulators of gene expression
Microbiology; BTI
Physiology and genetic engineering of environmental bacteria
Plant Biology
Systems biology of plant disease resistance
Soil, Water and Climate; BTI
Biocatalysis/biodegradation of chlorocarbon compounds, bioremediation, plant-microbe interactions with bradurhizobiujm and rhizobium, exophysiology of E. coli, methods to determine sources of bacteria in the environment