Chemical Biology Seminar: Professor Angad Mehta, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
About the Seminar
Synthetic Biology for Evolutionary Studies and Human Health
In my lab, evolutionary observations are an inspiration for biological design. In this talk, I will discuss two key areas of research in my lab: (i) directed endosymbiosis to study organelle evolution and develop synthetic biology platforms and (ii) continuous directed evolution to rapidly develop biologics.
The first part of my talk is inspired by the evolutionary observation which suggests that chloroplasts evolved from cyanobacterial endosymbionts established within eukaryotic cells (i.e., a cell within a cell system). This endosymbiosis eventually led to the origin of chloroplasts and photosynthetic eukaryotic life-forms. Inspired by these fascinating evolutionary observations, we investigated if we could engineer artificial endosymbiosis between genetically tractable cyanobacteria and budding yeasts. Through a series of engineering efforts, we generated cyanobacteria strains to survive within yeast cells as endosymbionts and perform chloroplast-like functions for the yeast cells. This resulted in the generation of a carbon assimilating, photosynthetic artificial life-form comprising of yeast/cyanobacteria chimeras that were able to grow under photosynthetic conditions for multiple generations of growth. We are using these systems for understanding the molecular details of organelle evolution and for synthetic biology applications like CO2 capture, photosynthetic metabolic engineering amongst others.
The next part of my talk is inspired by how our immune system evolves antibodies to combat invading pathogens. Significant progress has been made to elucidate the molecular details of antibody evolution and maturation in human immune system. We seek to leverage this understanding to develop continuous directed evolution platforms that can be used to evolve proteins directly in human cell lines. I will first describe our efforts to develop these continuous directed evolution platforms and then describe the progress we have made towards adapting these platforms to evolve antibodies. Due to the modularity of these approaches, we anticipate that these platforms can be rapidly repurposed to develop biologics targeting emerging viruses as well as disease states.
About the Speaker
Professor Mehta received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. After his postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Professor Mehta joined the University of Illinois in Fall 2019 where he is currently T. M. Balthazor Faculty Scholar and Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Affiliate in the Department of Bioengineering and has a faculty appointment at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research interests are in the areas of synthetic biology, synthetic immunology and chemical biology.