A Synthetic Biology Approach to Enzyme Engineering
"Effective mutagenesis strategies in enzyme engineering are often dependent on the generation of small and targeted, high-quality libraries of mutants. Such 'smart' libraries are consistent with practical constraints imposed by the screening effort; while point-mutant libraries are readily screened, we need creative solutions to improve our capacity to explore the combinatorial complexity of sequence space."
In this webinar, Dr. Quaglia will talk about how she used a flexible approach based on directed evolution and the Golden Gate cloning strategy to target three distinct regions of Candida antarctica lipase A (Cal-A) generating a series of diverse libraries. Screening to improve discrimination of short-chain versus long-chain fatty acid substrates was aided by the development of a general, automated method that allowed for visual discrimination in the hydrolysis of varied substrates in whole cells.
Dr. Quaglia earned her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and her Master’s in Chemistry of Biological Molecules at the University of Florence in Italy. She then pursued her doctorate in Biocatalysis at University College Dublin, Ireland, where her work focused on the study of the enzyme Horse Liver Alcohol Dehydrogenase and its application in the synthesis of anti-inflammatory drugs. She then moved to the UK, where she worked in industry at Synthace, a Synthetic Biology company in London, then in academia, as a Research Associate in Biocatalysis in the laboratory of Prof. Nicholas Turner at the University of Manchester. Dr. Quaglia has also been involved in teaching at undergraduate level both at the Dundalk Institute of Technology (Ireland) and at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Furthermore, she has a passion for scientific communication: in the past she has been awarded in a prestigious NatureJobs writing competition and a UK Biochemical Society outreach award. More recently, she was appointed Community Editor for the PLOSSynbio blog, part of the PLOS group. Her writing is regularly published in widely-read blogs such as the Huffington Post and you can follow her on Twitter (@Dny_Q).
