Tobias W. Giessen, Ph.D.
BME Faculty Candidate and Guest Speaker
Harvard Medical School

“A bioarchitectonic approach to biological production and nanoscale control”

Abstract:
We all face a number of interconnected major challenges in the 21st century, including climate change, environmental pollution and health care crises. Pursuing sustainable and efficient biological production approaches of drugs, fuels and materials as well as continued biomedical innovation are two of the main strategies needed to address these problems. My approach to tackling these issues relies on the discovery, understanding and engineering of self-assembling protein-based nanostructures. In this talk, I will focus on encapsulin nanocompartments, a recently discovered class of small protein organelles. I will first discuss two newly discovered encapsulin systems relating to iron metabolism and the global nitrogen cycle. Building on a fundamental understanding of encapsulin assembly, a number of engineering projects which utilize programmable engineered nanospaces to improve biological production and exert spatiotemporal control over metabolism will then be presented. Finally, I will briefly outline future projects that employ engineered 3D and 1D nanostructures for applications in drug delivery, molecular imaging, biosensing and engineering the biology-electronics interface.