ESP Biography

Cells have evolved over millions of years to highly specialized functions, but all cells require external resources to use as the building blocks for their growth and survival. Using the cells’ own machinery, i.e. metabolic pathways, we can now engineer cells to not only grow better, but to grow better and make specialized chemical and biological products. This course will cover the mechanisms of cell growth and maintenance, methods for synthetic biology, methods for engineering new metabolic pathways, and real-world applications. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to run an in class experiment testing the effects of various metabolic engineering and synthetic biology methods on production of novel compounds.

First, students will be introduced to the building blocks of proteins and their heirarchal structures. Second, students will learn how to engineer proteins using computational and recombinant design methods. Third, students will learn about the various methods of protein production. Lastly, we will discuss applications of engineered proteins and protein-based materials.