The fifth ChBE seminar of the Fall Quarter will be Thursday, October 29th at 9am in LR4. Dr. Ryan Gill from the University of Colorado will present a seminar titled,"A Design-Build-Test-Learn Technology Platform for the Multiplex Engineering of Microbial Systems"detailed information is given below: Date & Time: Thursday, October 29th 9:00 am - 10:00 amLocation: Tech LR4 (refreshments will be available at 8:45am)Speaker: Dr. Ryan Gill, University of ColoradoTitle: A Design-Build-Test-Learn Technology Platform for the Multiplex Engineering of Microbial Systems AbstractThe era of genome engineering is now well underway. DNA synthesis and sequencing capabilities continue to advance at rates beyond Moore's law, to the point that reading and writing DNA are no longer the rate limiting step in the engineering of biological systems. Current applications of these technologies seek to construct genomes that can perform increasingly complex functions; ranging from the production of chemicals, fuels, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals to the recoding of microbiome relevant organisms for applications in human health, energy, or the environment among others. Such applications will require that we are able to not only identify genes encoding key functions but also combinations of such genes, and combinations of such combinations, that together result in desired organism performance. We are developing a range of new technologies along these lines that include i) the construction and use of "ideal" chassis strains, ii) efficient searching of mutational space for the identification of gene-phenotype relationships, iii) rapid, flexible, and high-throughput genome-editing methods, and iv) construction and parallel interrogation of such combinatorial mutation libraries to identify combinatorial design rules. This presentation will describe the first generation of such technologies, the current state of next-generation approaches, and the most recent application of such tools to the design and engineering of microbial systems.

BiographyDr. Ryan Gill is a Patten Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado and the Associate Director of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute. Gill received his BS in Chemical Engineering from The John Hopkins University in 1993. He then received his MS in 1997and PhD in 1999 from the University of Maryland. Gill's research falls within the general fields of metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, directed evolution, and genomics and is targeted primarily towards the development biorefining processes for the sustainable production of fuels, commodity chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. We are generally focused on the development of new i) tools for strain engineering (i.e. genome engineering), ii) methods for efficiently determining the genetic basis of so engineered strains (i.e. functional genomics), and iii) frameworks for rationalizing relationships identified between genome structure and function.