Since both organisms and devices use electrons as information and energy carriers, interfacing living cells with electrodes offers the opportunity to control key biological processes electronically. In the first part of my talk, I will describe how we have transformed the industrial microbe Escherichia coli into an electroactive bacterium, whose behavior we can control electronically. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss new structural understanding of how proteins can electronically interface microbes with materials. Together this work paves the way for rationally constructing electronically-controlled organisms.
This seminar will take place on April 28th, 2016 at 4:00 PM in ESB 1001. This seminar will be followed by a reception from 5 to 6:30 pm.
Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Molecular Foundry. She received her PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University and was a post-doctoral fellow working on synthetic biology at Harvard Medical School.