[Bioundgrd] UROP Project in Molecular Biology & BioProcessing

[Stu Dietz]

Spring 2005 UROP opportunity for a junior or senior.  Can be taken for either pay or credit.  Interested students should contact Dr. Jean-Francois Hamel (jhamel at mit.edu) in ChemE.

>Bioprocess Engineering UROP position, Spring 2005 term, 10 hours/week:
>Molecular Biology in Bioprocess Engineering
>
>Recombinant E. coli are routinely used for the production of pharmaceutical
>protein products. Because they rarely secrete a recombinant product (due to
>limited prokaryotic cellular machinery), an E. coli culture must be harvested,
>the bacteria disrupted (broken open), and the recombinant protein purified. The cell wall makes it difficult to disrupt E. coli, causing the mechanical
>disruption step at the industrial scale to be time consuming and expensive. The work involving this UROP project seeks to implement a novel bioprocess that utilizes a recombinant, rather than mechanical disruption mechanism. In this project, the student will construct and study the behavior of several strains of E. coli capable of inducible lysis. The lysis mechanism will be based on bacteriophage lysozyme and holin proteins.
>
>The ideal candidate is a motivated junior or senior with experience in molecular biology related to gene cloning and plasmid vector design. Ideally, work on the project will start immediately. Depending on the level of interest, the student will also have the opportunity to see (and experiment with) the direct use of his/her strains in bioprocess engineering research.


-- 
Stu Dietz
Biology Education Office, Rm. 68-120
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139

Phone (617) 252-1783
Fax (617) 258-9329