Building a Biofoundry to Accelerate Biotechnology from Extreme & Exceptional Microorganisms

A collective of research projects aimed at “domesticating” environmental microbes, with a focus on engineering anaerobes that work together in complex communities to decompose and recycle carbon biomass throughout the Earth – from our guts to landfills and compost piles. Despite their importance, little information exists to parse the role of each microbial member within their dynamic community. To address these knowledge gaps, we pioneered new techniques to isolate anaerobes from biomass-rich environments (e.g. guts and fecal materials of herbivores), characterize their shared metabolism, and engineer synthetic microbiomes to drive biomass to renewable chemicals. Many of these anaerobic microbes possess traits (e.g. pathways, proteins, structures) that stand to transform biotechnology and its array of applications to environment, health, and sustainability. Finally, together with a collaborative team of investigators at UCSB, UC-Riverside, and CalPolyPomona, we are translating many of our microbial manipulation techniques to automated, high-throughput platforms through the new NSF BioFoundry for Extreme & Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB). ExFAB is a user facility that not only fills a critical gap of biological infrastructure both within the US and on the Central Coast/Inland California, but also empowers users from an extensive array of academic and industry partners with the tools and technology needed to make new breakthroughs where extreme microbiology meets biotechnology.