{"314731":{"#nid":"314731","#data":{"type":"event","title":"ChBE Seminar Series -- Paul Barton","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EIn addition to its annual lectures, ChBE hosts a weekly seminar throughout the year with invited lecturers who are prominent in their fields. Unless otherwise noted, all seminars are held on Wednesdays in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building (\u0022M\u0022 Building) in G011 (Cherry Logan Emerson Lecture Theater) at 4 p.m. Refreshments are served at 3:30 p.m. in the Emerson-Lewis Reception Salon.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E_____________\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E\u0022Design of Microbial Consortia for Industrial Biotechnology\u0022\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EPaul Barton, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003EAbstract:\u003C\/em\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELarge-scale production using microorganisms has long been recognized as a promising source for sustainable fuels and chemicals. However, monocultures optimized for high metabolic production in a sterile laboratory environment are often not economical at production scale due to high costs of capital and substrates, lack of resilience and stability of the culture, etc.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOn the other hand, most microorganisms in natural environments do not live in isolation, but exist as part of complex, dynamically changing, microbial consortia. These natural consortia exhibit high productivity combined with high resilience to invasion and can process a wide range of readily available substrates. Hence, synthesis of artificial biological process systems based on microbial consortia seems a promising approach to low cost sustainable production of fuels and chemicals.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENevertheless, it remains a great challenge to realize such multispecies cultures in industrial applications. Using algal production of fuels and chemicals as an illustrative example, we outline a roadmap towards the quantitative design and optimization of low cost resilient artificial ecologies based on microbial consortia.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETo address this challenge, multi-scale models are proposed, which integrate metabolic information available from high-throughput experiments with the ecological scale of the interactions between multiple species and the process scale of bioreactors. These models are formulated as dynamic systems with optimization problems embedded, and progress towards numerical tools for simulation, sensitivity analysis and optimization will be reported.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe long-term goal is a quantitative approach that will enable chemical engineers to design artificial ecologies for a desired purpose in much the same manner as a traditional chemical process.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":"","field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"ChBE hosts a weekly seminar throughout the year with invited lecturers who are prominent in their fields."}],"uid":"28045","created_gmt":"2014-08-11 18:38:47","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 02:08:39","author":"Amy Schneider","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2014-09-17T17:00:00-04:00","event_time_end":"2014-09-17T18:00:00-04:00","event_time_end_last":"2014-09-17T18:00:00-04:00","gmt_time_start":"2014-09-17 21:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2014-09-17 22:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2014-09-17 22:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"1240","name":"School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1795","name":"Seminar\/Lecture\/Colloquium"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78771","name":"Public"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EAmy Schneider\u003Cbr \/\u003ESchool of Chemical \u0026amp; Biomolecular Engineering\u003Cbr \/\u003E(404) 385-2299\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:news@chbe.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Einfo@chbe.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}