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Tobias Erb outlines the principles of building synthetic metabolism using, as an example, work in his lab to engineer bacteria to undergo synthetic carbon dioxide fixation.

Talk Overview:
The conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to biomass via photosynthesis is the foundation for all of our food and energy. Tobias Erb explains how his lab is working to design, build and optimize pathways for synthetic CO2 fixation. By combining enzymes from multiple organisms with “re-engineered” enzymes and optimizing the processes, Erb and his lab generated a synthetic cycle that fixes CO2 more energy efficiently than photosynthesis. In the future, they plan to test the system in artificial cells and to transplant it into bacteria and chloroplasts.  The video exemplifies the general rules and principles of building synthetic metabolism.

Speaker Biography:
Tobias Erb studied biology and chemistry at the University of Freiburg and Ohio State University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois before starting his own group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.  In 2014, Erb moved to the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany where he became Director and Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Synthetic Metabolism in 2017. Erb’s lab studies the principles of natural metabolism with the aim of using this knowledge to build, from basics, novel synthetic metabolic processes.  Erb is particularly interested in the enzymes and pathways of bacteria that capture and convert carbon dioxide.

In 2015, Erb was named one of 12 up-and-coming-scientists by the American Chemical Society and in 2016 he received the Heinz-Maier-Leibniz prize of the German Research Foundation.  

Learn more about Erb’s research here:
http://www.mpi-marburg.mpg.de/erb