Enzymes are the workhorse catalysts involved in many aspects of bioenergy research at JBEI. The Microfluidics Group is developing high-throughput and high-content assay platforms for characterizing enzymes and enzyme-variants, along with their substrates and products. This involves utilization of state-of-the-art microfluidic chips that can be interfaced with fluorescence detectors for rapid and sensitive detection. The goal is to develop cross-cutting microscale technologies for advancing biofuels development that are robust yet easy to use.
Projects
- Development of microfluidic (i.e. lab-on-a-chip) tools for screening ionic liquid and synthetic biology applications.
- Assay development at the interface of droplet microfluidics and mass spectrometry to streamline the discovery and optimization of biomanufacturing pathways.
- Development of novel surfactants for microfluidic droplet formation. These sugar based surfactants have diverse biological applications including cell cultures, enzymatic activity assays, DNA synthesis etc.
- Development of a method for Next-Generation DNA Synthesis.
- Automation and scale-down of established assays for feedstock deconstruction and fuel synthesis using solids- and liquid-handling robots, with custom hardware for elevated temperatures and evaporation minimization.
- Adapt electrophoretic glycan analysis to a commercial microfluidic instrument and demonstrate screening of GT and GH enzymes in 96-well format.
Featured Media
Microfluidic Device Mixes And Matches DNA For Synthetic Biology
Publications
- “A droplet-to-digital (D2D) microfluidic device for single cell assays”, Lab Chip (2015)
- “A Versatile Microfluidic Device for Automating Synthetic Biology”, ACS Synth Biol (2015)
- “Pressure stabilizer for reproducible picoinjection in droplet microfluidic systems”, Lab Chip (2014)
- “Versatile on-demand droplet generation for controlled encapsulation”, Biomicrofluidics (2014)
- “Rapid Kinetic Characterization of Glycosyl Hydrolases Based on Oxime Derivatization and Nanostructure-Initiator Mass Spectrometry (NIMS)”, ACS Chem Biol (2014)
- “Droplet-based microfluidic platform for heterogeneous enzymatic assays”, Lab Chip (2013)
- “A universal flow cytometry assay for screening carbohydrate-active enzymes using glycan microspheres”, Chem Communications (2013)
- “Acoustic deposition with NIMS as a high-throughput enzyme activity assay”, Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry (2012)
- “Nanostructure-initiator mass spectrometry (NIMS) for the analysis of enzyme activities”, Curr protoc chem biol (2012)
- “Encoding substrates with mass tags to resolve stereospecific reactions using Nimzyme”, Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (2012)
- “Colloid-based multiplexed screening for plant biomass-degrading glycoside hydrolase activities in microbial communities”, Energy and Environmental Science (2011)
- “Microfluidic Glycosyl Hydrolase Screening for Biomass-to-Biofuel Conversion”, Analytical Chemistry (2010)