Like many of his colleagues in the Department of Biological Engineering, graduate university student Tzu-Chieh “Zijay” Tang employs microbes and artificial biology — redesigning the genetic devices of organisms — in his investigate. However, his study objectives are one thing of an outlier in his office: water quality programs.
“I really feel like there’s a substantial imbalance of expertise, at minimum at MIT,” says Tang, a fifth-12 months doctoral scholar. “A good deal of folks go into the biomedical field, and pretty couple of choose on environmental problems.” To him, troubles like local weather adjust or food stuff and h2o stability are the most urgent worries, and present fantastic opportunities for pupils in biological engineering to make a big difference. Though interested in the atmosphere and influenced by the organic globe considering the fact that a youthful age, he arrived to enjoy these troubles even much more, he says, as a outcome of his encounter in 2017 as one particular of a few inaugural fellows as a result of the Fellowship for H2o Methods program at the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Units Lab (J-WAFS). He details to J-WAFS as a key contributor to raising the profile of environmental study on campus and shifting the imbalance: “J-WAFS genuinely has a vision of a sustainable long term, and has been the most effective supporter of our investigation — and of me individually, as a researcher.”
When Tang initial came to MIT immediately after studying materials science as a master’s college student in Abu Dhabi, he joined the Mediated Matter team in the Media Lab. He was thrilled by the prospect of bioengineering novel products under the principal investigator, Affiliate Professor Neri Oxman, “an wonderful designer with terrific visions about how to make elements influenced by character.” But soon after a couple of months, he understood that innovation in organic research, which takes place on a time frame of months to years, simply cannot retain tempo with style and design deadlines, which tend to be on the buy of weeks. Oxman’s team typically worked with totally created bioengineered devices. Tang, even so, desired to innovate on the elementary biology by itself, and moved to the artificial biology team of Tim Lu, affiliate professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer system science. Not a single to restrict his actively playing industry, Tang still chats with Media Lab scientists to glean inspiration.
And Tang’s collaborative spirit extends significantly afield. A MISTI Seed Grant and a summer time at Imperial Higher education London grew into a cross-Atlantic effort to produce dwelling membranes with microbes, in a process influenced by the fermented beverage kombucha. Sweet tea is turned into acidic, fizzy kombucha by a symbiotic tradition of micro organism and yeast (SCOBY), which exists in a gelatinous biofilm composed mainly of cellulose developed by the microorganisms on their own.
The process is self-assembling and necessitates only a cheap sugar-based mostly option to preserve, properties that greatly appealed to Tang and his collaborators. Working from the kombucha basic principle, they produced Syn-SCOBY: a strong, cellulose-dependent biofilm established by and encapsulating a co-tradition of engineered microbes. 1 model of the Syn-SCOBY contained yeast that could detect and degrade the environmental pollutant β-estradiol, but the workforce emphasized that the modularity of the process meant that it could be custom-made to goal a extensive variety of apps.
“People in the lab came to me asking if I could include peptides [amino acid chains] that can bind coronavirus particles into the Syn-SCOBY substance,” Tang recalls. “I imagine this could probably be completed quite rapidly. Which is why I believe building platform systems is so useful: you can adapt to diverse emergencies.” When Tang is effectively-versed in establishing organic products to handle h2o contamination, it is in pathogen detection exactly where biosensors have an even increased edge in excess of other much more set up measurement technologies, he suggests. And even though mass spectrometers can detect chemical pollutants reliably, if not always cheaply or in the industry, optimizing them to evaluate organic particles this kind of as viruses has so significantly proved tough.
Tang has now attained recognition for his study achievements — he gained a Lemelson-MIT Prize in the “Eat It!” classification for his Syn-SCOBY filters. Nevertheless, what he really would like is to see educational exploration translated to serious purposes. A person major problem is scalability, which Tang aims to prevent with his kombucha-influenced biomaterial. Syn-SCOBY is self-replicating, strong, and easy to make. Tang also hopes that the existence of hundreds of kombucha homebrewers will make it less complicated to link with the public and get them excited about this research.
Four yrs back, Tang started building biosensors in the form of microorganisms-that contains hydrogel beads. The germs are engineered to gentle up in the existence of water contaminants (he tested this with, amid other samples, Charles River h2o). Formulating the hydrogel was a important component of the task: Tang necessary the material to not only defend and feed the micro organism, but also to prevent the microorganisms from leaking out. Tang ongoing iterating on his thoughts all through his J-WAFS fellowship, and has concluded developing a bead formulation that not only fulfills his structure needs, but can be conveniently tailored to host unique microbes.
With true-planet programs of his innovations at any time on his head, Tang sought information on use-circumstance eventualities from marketplace experts, connections that have been made feasible by way of the fellowship’s funder, the international h2o technology business Xylem. For illustration, Tang gleaned from the company’s researchers which contaminants were being basically of curiosity to market, which served him pick cadmium as a take a look at of the beads’ prospective true-environment use. In addition, he learned that while the beads can’t report measurements as specifically as the gold normal of mass spectrometry, they are much less expensive and significantly extra portable at the exact same time, the beads are much more precise than probes, which are the present go-to for preliminary tests.
Presently, Tang does not have ideas to just take his micro organism beads to industry, but is even so brainstorming approaches to improve them: He sees a probable to increase the system’s sensitivity by incorporating new microbe engineering procedures created in the lab of MIT biological engineering Professor Christopher Voigt. As for Syn-SCOBY, Tang suggests he could possibly discover the technology’s startup opportunity as a result of the Blueprint entrepreneurship system made available by The Motor, the startup incubator started by MIT.
Tang is also thinking about growing beyond the industry of biosensors following graduating in the fall. He feels a sturdy impetus toward local climate transform study, especially in advancing carbon elimination technological know-how. It is one more spot wherever he sees a yawning gap in between academia and software, as very well as a extended way to go in phrases of scalability. In this regard, Tang suggests the skill of organic systems to self-propagate provides them an gain above mechanical techniques of carbon seize. But he cautions that this exact same self-propagation will make demanding biocontainment of any engineered organisms a critical aspect of any program that is deployed — an component that Tang took pains to guarantee in his Syn-SCOBY and microbial hydrogel systems, and an component that he will proceed to push for in his long term work.