Time: 14th Jan., 2019, 9:00-11:00 am
Venue: Conference Room 406 in Biotechnology Building
Lecturer: TAN Zaigao,Rice University
Abstract:
The use of traditional chemically catalytic technique to produce bulk chemicals has received several drawbacks, such as high dependence on fossil resources, as well as energy consumption and environmental pollution. In addition, traditional methods for obtaining natural plant products often come from direct extraction from plants, which suffer from long production cycle, low yield, and high cost. Therefore, construction of highly efficient microbial cell factories that can utilize renewable biomass feedstocks for production of such bio-based chemicals will be the “green” alternative route to currently used techniques mentioned above. In this presentation, I will introduce how to use metabolic engineering and synthetic biology strategies to obtain efficient microbial cell factories, with the goal of synthesizing bulk chemicals and high value natural products from inexpensive biomass. In particular, this presentation will emphasize how to rationally engineer the biosynthetic pathways from different perspectives (metabolic pathway balance, robustness engineering etc.), and how to propose novel artificial synthetic pathways/platforms to replace naturally existed pathways for bio-chemicals synthesis in more efficient manner.
Introduction:
Dr. TAN Zaigao is the postdoctoral associate of Rice University currrently. He obtanied his PhD degree from Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in July 2014. Then, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Iowa State University (USA) until Sept 2016, with the major research on tolerance engineering of micorbial cell factory for fatty acids production. From Sept 2016 to now, he is the postdoctoral associate in the Department of Chemcial and Biomolecular Engieering, Rice University (USA). During this period, his researches mainly focus on creation of novel synthetic pathways/platforms for synthesis of plant natural products. So far, Dr. Tan has constrcted a series of microbial cell factories for production of bio-chemcials such as succinate, fatty acid and plant products, published more than 15 peer-reviewed SCI papers in journals such as Metabolic Engineering, ACS synthetic biology, Biotechnology for Biofuels, and Appl. Environ. Microbiol, and applied for 1 PCT international patent (granted), 1 US patent, and 1 Chinese patent (granted).
Contact: Prof. Yongjin Zhou, 18T6
Phone: 0411-84771060