Haoran Zhang
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Engineering
Most industrial fermentation uses a single microbe doing a single job. Mixing several microbes in one vessel could be far more powerful, because each member can carry out part of a long chemical pathway, but mixed cultures are notoriously hard to keep balanced: one member outgrows the others and the product never appears.
- Fields
Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
- Topics
synthetic biology
optogenetics
microbial communities
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Build closed-loop control of microbial communities by linking metabolite biosensors, which report chemical concentrations inside cells, to optogenetic circuits that use light to speed or slow the growth of targeted community members.
- Use light-controlled growth to engineer interactions among community members that share a collaborative biosynthetic pathway, and raise the yield of the desired chemical product.
- Identify the community composition that maximizes production over the course of a co-culture run, testing whether closed-loop control recovers performance after sub-optimal inoculation or deliberate system perturbation.
- Test the generality of the control strategy in communities that differ in structure: same-species versus multi-species consortia, linear versus non-linear pathways, and biosensors that detect pathway intermediates versus final products.
More about the research
This project asks whether a mixed microbial community can be steered automatically, in real time, so that its composition stays at the point where production is highest.
Why it matters
High-value chemicals, fuels and food ingredients made by fermentation could be produced more efficiently if several specialized microbes worked together instead of one strain doing everything. Automated light-based control guided by metabolite sensors could keep such mixed cultures productive despite poor starting conditions or process upsets, supporting biomanufacturing, renewable energy and sustainable chemical production, and giving researchers a way to study how engineered microbial communities behave.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Seunghyun Sim
University of California-Irvine, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Build a high-throughput screen for enzyme activity using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, an instrument that sorts single particles by brightness, together with engineered chemical probes that fluoresce only when the displayed enzyme turns over its substrate.
Michael Alvarez
University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, PR·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a scalable, AI-enabled bioreactor platform for growing mesenchymal stem cells (adult stem cells used in therapies) and collecting their extracellular vesicles, small particles cells release.
Feng Guo
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Integrate digital acoustofluidics, which uses sound to move droplets held in oil, with AI-guided closed-loop image feedback to generate droplets of controlled volume, transport them in parallel, and fuse and mix them on demand.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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