Tracking Engineered Microbiomes Across Time and From Space

The promise of microbial and molecular engineering to address urgent environmental challenges, such as pollutant remediation, remains limited by safety concerns and lack of efficacy when scaled from the lab to the field. In this lecture, Yonatan Chemla, Ph.D., K99 and Human Frontier Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, will show how synthetic biology can be used to track the survival and stability of microorganisms and genes in the environment using the context of an Estonian oil shale fire that took place in 1989. His talk will underscore both the benefits and risks of environmental biotechnology and the pressing need for robust biomolecular tools tailored to the environment.

This event is part of the “Engineered Microbes for Environmental Release” webinar series that brings together voices from synthetic biology, ecology, policy, science and technology studies, biotechnology, ethics, and history to explore the social, technological, and environmental dimensions of these innovations. Hosted by the Baker Institute’s Science and Technology Policy Program and co-sponsored by the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, this webinar series was supported by a grant from Schmidt Sciences and the National Science Foundation (#2223678 & #2515431).

This event is free and open to the public.