We’re excited to announce that a new grant of around $200,000 has been awarded for research at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering! The project focuses on understanding and engineering how different types of bacteria communicate and work together. Bacteria naturally live in communities and interact in ways that can lead to non-linear results. By controlling these interactions, we could create new solutions for cleaning up environmental contaminants, improving agriculture, and developing new therapies.
In this grant, the Oliveira lab will create synthetic bacterial communities to sense heavy metals in water contaminants. They’ll also develop tools to study how bacteria communicate with each other using chemical signals (HSLs). This work includes developing a particular microfluidics platform to observe these interactions at the single-cell level.
This project is not just about research; it’s also about education. Workshops for high school students will be held at UMass Amherst and Boston University, and there will be plenty of opportunities for K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students to get hands-on experience in synthetic biology. We hope this will help train the next generation of scientists and engineers, focusing on increasing diversity in STEM fields.
Stay tuned for more updates as this exciting research unfolds!
Public link: https://www.bu.edu/eng/2023/01/12/programmable-bacteria-building-the-biocomputing-future/
Check our research Menu and major sponsors and collaborators on our website at https://www.oliveiralab.me/research
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