Category: News & Outreach

With all of the lab happenings, it became clear that photo gallery was a necessary website addition. Check out our new “Gallery” tab, which is newly updated with 2016 Lab Picnic photos and Amelia’s Thesis Printing Adventure.  

As part of the Science in St. Louis seminar series, I-CARES Director Himadri Pakrasi presented a talk entitled “Engineering Biology and Energy from the Sun: the Future is Bright for Food, Feed and Fuels.”

Pakrasi Lab discovered a fast growing cyanobacterial strain and showed that the genome of the new strain can be easily manipulated, a characteristic essential to its use as a host for projects in synthetic biology. “Cyanobacteria have the potential to be the ideal biofactories for sustainable carbon negative production of numerous compounds,” Pakrasi said. “This fast-growing […]

For 2014, iGEM @ WUSTL and the Pakrasi Lab will continue their exciting new project. These undergraduate students will seek to make an E. coli strain into a nitroGENIOUS capable of fixing nitrogen directly from the atmosphere into proteins.  

A potential first step towards nitrogen-fixing plants The Pakrasi Lab and collaborators at Wash U. and Pennsyvania State University have an exciting new project to engineer nitrogen fixation into Synechocystis 6803, a model photosynthetic bacterium that currently does not have this capability. This project will serve as a first step towards engineering plants to fix […]

The accomplishments of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers were highlighted as part of DOE’s EFRC PI Meeting held July 18-19, 2013 in Washington, DC. PARC postdoctoral researcher and Pakrasi lab member Michelle Liberton was chosen to receive an award for her oral presentation “Probing light harvesting and photosynthetic productivity in cyanobacteria” describing work with PARC […]

This week, I-CARES is hosting the 11th workshop on cyanobacteria on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Many members of the Pakrasi Lab will participate in this exciting workshop.  

Congratulations to Amelia Nguyen on her recent NSF-GRF award!  Within the biology department, Tara Enders (Strader Lab) also received an NSF-GRF award and Tara Alpert (Jez Lab) and first-year grad students Eric Hamilton and Libby Frick were honorable mentions. Great work everyone!

Pakrasi lab members Brian Landry (a former iGEM participant), Larry Page, and Bert Berla are joining with Profs. Joe Jez and Gautam Dantas mentoring the 2012 WashU iGEM team in their efforts to produce the major flavor compounds of Saffron in Synechocystis 6803.  

Leaders of WUSTL and of many St. Louis area energy-related companies gathered with Senator Claire McCaskill in Brauer Hall for a discussion that was part of the Senator’s ‘Hometown Energy Tour’.