Research Focus
Jess Sustarich is a Staff Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. He has extensive experience in MEMS fabrication of nano/microfluidic devices for biochemical production and analysis. His research focuses on developing mechatronic hardware for high-throughput platforms that mitigate bottlenecks in synthetic biology processes, increasing the scale of data output from experiments to a level that enables the use of machine learning predictive algorithms. The platforms developed by his group serve as enabling tools for protein pathway engineering of microorganisms producing biofuels and enzymes for conversion of biomass to biofuels.
Projects
- A fully automated High-Throughput Microfluidic Electroporation (HTME) Platform performing 384 sub-microliter volume electroporation experiments in parallel, using novel and proprietary electronics that automatically fine tune the electrical parameters for each individual experiment.
- A microfluidic cell free platform utilizing an array of digital microfluidic (DMF) electrodes to manipulate microliter reaction volumes to quantify the activity of multi-component protein pathways, testing large scales of varied phenotypes in parallel.
- Development of a method for Next-Generation DNA Synthesis.
- Assay development at the interface of droplet microfluidics and mass spectrometry to streamline the discovery and optimization of biomanufacturing pathways.
Featured Publications
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- “Perspectives for self-driving labs in synthetic biology”, Current Opinion in Biotechnology (2023)
- “Scalable and automated CRISPR-based strain engineering using droplet microfluidics”, Microsyst Nanoeng, (2022)
- “A machine learning Automated Recommendation Tool for synthetic biology”, Nat Communications, (2020)
- “A Droplet Microfluidic Platform for Automating Genetic Engineering.” ACS Synthetic Biology (2016)
- “A droplet-to-digital (D2D) microfluidic device for single cell assays”, Lab Chip (2015)
- “Droplet-based microfluidic platform for heterogeneous enzymatic assays”, Lab Chip (2013)