As the Department of Energy's Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory advances its mission to develop science-driven biotechnology, a new generation of leaders is helping shape the future of its research programs. Three scientists - Adam Guss, John Lovell and Dan Olson - have recently stepped into team lead roles, bringing deep technical expertise and a shared commitment to collaborative innovation across CBI's multidisciplinary network.
As lead for the Rapid Genetics Team, Guss will help accelerate the pace of discovery for high-performing microbial systems and bioenergy crops with the development of advanced genetic engineering tools. Lovell will guide research focused on improving one of the most promising bioproduct perennial feedstocks as lead for the Poplar Team. Olson assumes leadership of the Consolidated Bioprocessing Team, developing methods using bacteria that are good at digesting and converting plants to high-value products in a single step with few to no additional inputs to lower costs and improve production efficiency.
"CBI's strength has always come from its people and its partnerships. Adam, John and Dan are leaders in their scientific fields, and I'm excited to see how their creativity and collaboration will strengthen our research enterprise and deliver breakthroughs to power U.S. manufacturing," said CBI Director Jerry Tuskan. CBI stewards the work of hundreds of scientists across 22 partner institutions making foundational discoveries that can scale to the marketplace.
The team leads recently answered a few questions on their new roles with CBI.
Adam Guss: Rapid Genetics Team Lead
Guss is lead for the Microbial Engineering Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Q: What expertise and skills are you bringing to the role of team lead for Rapid Genetics?
A: I have deep expertise in genetic tool development for non-model microorganisms and the application of these tools to understand and improve organisms and their metabolic pathways. By understanding how these tools work, we can apply them in novel ways to help solve our scientific challenges in both microbes and plants.
Q: What are the remaining challenges for rapid genetics, and what excites you most about the team's research?
A: Fine control of gene expression in non-model organisms is a remaining challenge that we are trying to solve, especially in heat-tolerant microbes and plants. Leveraging automation capabilities to accelerate genetic engineering is also a very exciting emerging area.
Q: What are the potential impacts of the team's discoveries, in terms of both fundamental science and scalable biotechnologies?
A: Because our role is the development of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering tools, the things that we create have very broad applicability in both fundamental science and engineering across a broad range of applications.
This includes DOE-relevant feedstock development, bioconversion, plant growth-promotion and critical mineral recovery, as well as other areas such as human health and production of secondary metabolites like antibiotics and other bioactive compounds.
Q: What are you looking forward to as team lead?
A: As a microbiologist, I love talking with plant biologists to understand how genetic engineering tools work, and I am excited about how plant and microbial synthetic biologists can learn from each other to make all our tools better. I also look forward to continuing the collaborative nature of our work for CBI. Individual labs cannot have the level of diverse expertise that a large center can have, and by bringing everyone together, we can innovate in ways that small groups cannot.
John Lovell: Poplar Team Lead
Lovell is research faculty investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology's Genome Sequencing Center.
Q: What expertise and skills are you bringing to the role of Poplar Team Lead for CBI?
A: As Poplar lead, I'm using my knowledge of plant ecology, physiology, quantitative genetics and breeding for optimization of experimental designs to maximize statistical power and causal inference. I am integrating the CBI poplar pangenome into existing experiments to expand trait discovery and genome engineering activities. I also bring many years of experience managing genome, breeding and evolutionary biology scientific projects with academic, governmental, non-profit and industry partners.
Q: How do HudsonAlpha's capabilities in genomic science make it an ideal new partner institution for CBI?
A: HudsonAlpha has already sequenced and assembled more than 20 poplar accessions and has developed many of the comparative and "pan" genomics tools that will be critical to discover and translate DNA sequences that drive trait variation.
Q: What are the remaining challenges for poplar domestication, and what excites you most about the team's research?
A: The last 10 years of CBI's poplar research has focused on resource generation and characterization (field trials, pan-genome, phenotyping), providing a strong foundation to anchor analysis and discovery. We're now applying these resources to find and validate genes, traits, environments and interactions that drive feedstock yield and value. Some of the exciting research directions ahead include lab-to-field initiatives like translating cell wall and drought response discoveries from highly controlled greenhouse conditions into field sites that mimic scaled-up production environments.
Q: What are the potential impacts of the team's discoveries, in terms of both fundamental science and scalable biotechnologies?
A: CBI is developing poplar as a model system through the development of a 'map' that connects trait variation (like woody biomass accumulation) with DNA sequences. Basic discoveries about genes that govern tree growth and physiology directly inform scientific enterprises across many woody biomass feedstock species.
Q: What are you looking forward to as team lead?
A: As we bring our genetic resources to bear on breeding and trait delivery objectives, I am excited to see how scientific discoveries in the poplar program translate to move other CBI programs forward.
Dan Olson: Consolidated Bioprocessing Team Lead
Olson is associate professor of engineering at Dartmouth College.
Q: What expertise and skills are you bringing to the role of Consolidated Bioprocessing Team Lead for CBI?
A: I have been involved with consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) for my entire research career. During my Ph.D. studies, I developed the genetic transformation technique used to engineer Clostridium thermocellum, one of the key CBP microbes being analyzed and engineered as part of CBI.
Q: Why is CBP a good approach to creating new chemicals and materials?
A: Lignocellulosic biomass, the structural polymers found in plants, is a massive global resource for chemicals, but it is not easy to break down and convert. Plants and microbes have been waging an "arms race" for the last several hundred million years, with plants developing ever more complex forms of biomass, and microbes developing correspondingly complex mechanisms for deconstruction of that biomass. Using nature's best natural lignocellulose-fermenting organisms takes advantage of the benefits of that evolutionary history without having to understand all of the mechanisms in detail.
Q: What are the remaining challenges for CBP, and what excites you most about the team's research?
A: The biggest challenge for CBP is to make the whole process cheap enough for commercial application. In general, this requires rapid solubilization, high product titer and robustness to process upsets and contamination. For real-world applications, there's also a large benefit to reducing complexity.
Q: What are the potential impacts of the team's discoveries, in terms of both fundamental science and scalable biotechnologies?
A: Although people have used microbes to produce ethanol for thousands of years, because the process natively works very well, there are many aspects and efficiencies that have not been studied in detail because they "just work." My group is focused on engineering non-ethanol producing microbes to produce ethanol at the yields and titers necessary for industrial application. In the process, we are learning fundamental features of microbial ethanol production that have been overlooked when studying native producers.
Q: What are you looking forward to as team lead?
A: Finding ways to help CBP team members collaborate together more effectively, while keeping the team focused on the overall goal of developing new understanding and new technologies that are useful in the real world.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science . - Stephanie Seay
