Zhang Receives CAREER Award from National Science Foundation

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By Beth Miller

Newswise Engineers design metabolic pathways in cells to convert cheap raw materials into useful chemicals, biofuels and pharmaceuticals, but its a delicate balance of systems for that to happen.

Fuzhong Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, will study these systems with a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The five-year, $605,000 award is for his project titled Synthetic Regulatory Systems for Dynamic Metabolic Pathways.

The awards support junior faculty who model the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organization. Zhang is the 21st faculty member in the School of Engineering & Applied Science to receive the award.

Zhangs research interests focus on applying synthetic biology, protein engineering, systems biology and metabolic engineering approaches to engineer biology. His goal is to create artificial biosystems that nature has not evolved and use them to turn microbial cells into microfactories for the efficient production of biofuels, drugs, materials and other value-added chemicals from sustainable resources. He also is interested in developing similar systems to solve environmental problems and to understand complex biology systems.

Zhang has developed dynamic regulation systems, which are artificial components that provide dynamic control to enzyme and metabolite concentrations within living cells. The NSF grant will allow Zhang to develop a systematic and quantitative understanding of how the dynamic regulation systems change the performance of metabolic pathways and how they improve productivity within the pathways.

The research, which builds on his previous work funded by Washington Universitys International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), will create knowledge and tools that other engineers and researchers can use to design metabolic control systems for their pathways of interest more effectively and reliably, Zhang says.

Many of the tools developed from this project also will be useful to perturb natural regulatory networks to study their role in natural pathways, Zhang said. Hopefully, that will be able to reveal more evolutionary significance of natural regulatory networks.

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Zhang Receives CAREER Award from National Science Foundation