The Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) award was recently granted to Advait Holkar, a PhD. candidate at the Srivastava lab at UCLA, at the American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting 2023 by the soft matter community (DSOFT). Advait’s research showcases how bottom-up synthetic biology can be utilized to for the large scale production of simplified “protocells” which are optimized for enzyme catalysis . These protocells concentrate enzymes locally within them, resulting in ~25x faster reaction rates for single enzyme reactions compared to free enzymes. A cascade reaction with two enzymes was also implemented where the co-localization of the enzymes reduces the accumulation of reaction intermediates, which can further improve reaction rates. This research was conducted at the Living BioFoundry (LBF) at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA and supported by BioPACIFIC MIP.
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