Vayu Maini Rekdal, Ph.D., Miller Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley

Title: Harnessing microbial metabolism for human health, flavor, and sustainability.

Abstract:  Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi inhabit virtually every corner of the planet, including the human gastrointestinal tract and many of the foods we love. Engineering microbial metabolism in these contexts has the potential to transform human and planetary health, but microbial engineering efforts are often limited by our poor understanding of microbial metabolism and a lack of genetic tools. This talk will describe my multidisciplinary work dissecting and manipulating microbial metabolism in the human gut microbiota and in microbially produced foods. I will share how enzyme discovery in the human gut microbiota has enabled new strategies for disease treatment and revealed molecular links between the gut microbiota and our diet. I will also discuss recent work bridging gastronomy, synthetic biology, and biochemistry, to unlock the potential of fungi for sustainable food production. Conducted in collaboration with Michelin-star restaurants, this work has uncovered mechanisms for converting food waste into delicious proteins and facilitated the development of genetic tools for efficiently engineering edible fungi. Long-term, this work should enable efforts to design microbial foods for health, sustainability, and flavor.