on-site event
Presidentti auditorium, BioCity
Spring 2022 poster

Prof. Cheryl Kerfeld, Michigan State University, US
Towards a circular bioeconomy: from photosynthetic to synthetic biology
host: Yagut Allahverdiyeva (allahve@utu.fi)

Coffee and sandwich served at 11:45

Six students and early-career postdocs are welcome to have a lunch in restaurant Mauno and discuss with Prof. Kerfeld after the seminar. This is a great possibility to learn hosting skills in friendly environment and create connections for future. Every student are welcome to join, in spite of which research group they belong to. BioCity Turku will offer the lunch.

If you got interested please send an email to biocityturku@bioscience.fi

Cheryl Kerfeld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Kerfeld) is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Structural Bioengineering at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University.  The Kerfeld Group  (www.kerfeldlab.org) is focused on structural synthetic biology, specifically on the structure, function and engineering of modular carotenoid-binding proteins that mediate cyanobacterial photoprotection and in self-assembling metabolic modules in bacteria, with the goal of repurposing these protein-based architectures into nanodevices and biomaterials for applications including catalysis, bioremediation, biomining and therapeutics.  Professor Kerfeld received her B.A. in Biology and English from the University of Minnesota, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Minnesota via the Regents’ Scholars Program, and a Ph.D. in Biology from UCLA. She also holds appointments in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology and the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Divisions of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Selected publications

Sutter M, Melnicki MR, Schulz F, Woyke T, Kerfeld CA. A catalog of the diversity and ubiquity of bacterial microcompartments. Nat Commun. 2021 Jun 21;12(1):3809
doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24126-4.

Asija K, Sutter M, Kerfeld CA. A Survey of Bacterial Microcompartment Distribution in the Human Microbiome. Front Microbiol. 2021 May 13;12:669024.
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.669024. eCollection 2021.

Nayfach S, Roux S, Seshadri R, Udwary D, Varghese N, Schulz F, Wu D, Paez-Espino D, Chen IM, Huntemann M, Palaniappan K, Ladau J, Mukherjee S, Reddy TBK, Nielsen T, Kirton E, Faria JP, Edirisinghe JN, Henry CS, Jungbluth SP, Chivian D, Dehal P, Wood-Charlson EM, Arkin AP, Tringe SG, Visel A; IMG/M Data Consortium, Woyke T, Mouncey NJ, Ivanova NN, Kyrpides NC, Eloe-Fadrosh EA. A genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes. Nat Biotechnol. 2021 Apr;39(4):499-509.
doi: 10.1038/s41587-020-0718-6. Epub 2020 Nov 9.

Young EJ, Sakkos JK, Huang J, Wright JK, Kachel B, Fuentes-Cabrera M, Kerfeld CA, Ducat DC. Visualizing in Vivo Dynamics of Designer Nanoscaffolds. Nano Lett. 2020 Jan 8;20(1):208-217.
doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b03651. Epub 2019 Dec 3.

General information

• Registration is not needed for on-site seminars
• Participation list is circulated in the audience
• If you are a student and later wish to get a certificate of attendance from the Frontier of Science seminars, please print out this seminar diary and after the seminar ask the BioCity coordinator to sign it
• Depending on Covid-situation all on-site FoS-seminars might have to be flipped to fully virtual even on short notice
• Please note that any audio or video recording of the seminars is strictly forbidden.