Speaker: Professor Noémie-Manuelle Dorval Courchesne, ing., PhD - Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, McGill University
Date: 14 March 2025
Time: 10:00am
Venue: CGC Seminar Room - 1st floor, Annex
Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe how my group has engineered functional curli fibers for a range of applications, including functional textiles, plastic-like thin films and mineralization scaffolds. I will also present how we have repurposed the curli secretion pathway to secrete other recombinant fusion proteins. For instance, I will highlight our recent advances in expressing and secreting recombinant bacterial collagen in a curli-inspired manner. Utilizing only the essential genes from the curli operon, we have established protocols to extracellularly produce collagen-like proteins that can assemble in triple helical structures. We have further developed simple processes to isolate these biomacromolecules from large volumes of bacterial cultures in a cost-efficient manner with potential for scale-up. We have used both curli fiber and bacterial collagen templates for the biomineralization of inorganic nanomaterials and for the fabrication of protein gels. Such recombinant materials have the potential for further genetic customization, making them promising candidates for a range of multifunctional bio-derived composite materials.