We are an interdisciplinary team at Berkeley Lab studying both engineered and environmental microbes. We are the Host Engineering group at JBEI, and we adopt targeted and systems biology approaches to elucidate causes of inhibition during fuel and chemicals production in microbial systems such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We focus on engineering robust hosts for metabolite production, and we develop strategies that are universally useful, for microbial host engineering. We also engineer microbes towards catabolism of environmental pollutants, where we address bioremediation of hydrocarbons, organophosphate and phosphonate compounds. We are part of the ENIGMA project where we take comprehensive systems biology approaches to examine bacterial signaling in ubiquitous and environmentally important, sulfate and metal reducing bacteria. We also study rainfall events and signaling in the fabulous cyanobacteria that dominate the desert soil crusts on our planet.
