SSB postdoc Dr. Barbara Bastos de Freitas recently presented her research at the Chlamy2023 and AlgalBBB conferences.

Several SSB group members, including Melany Villegas, Razan Yahya, Malak Abdallah, Sergio Gutiérrez, and Dr. Gordon Wellman attended this year's Metabolic Engineering Conference in Singapore.

SSB group's PhD student Mauricio Lopez-Portillo Masson, Dr. Barbara Bastos de Freitas, Dr. Sebastian Overmans, and Prof. Kyle Lauersen attended this year's International Conference on Algal Biomass, Biofuels & Bioproducts (AlgalBBB) in Hawaii together with their close collaborators Dr. Mark Seger and Prof. Peter Lammers from AzCATI.

PhD student Sergio Gutierrez and Postdoctoral Fellows Dr. Barbara Bastos de Freitas and Dr. Gordon Wellman attended the International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas at Princeton University.

SSB group PhD students Melany Villegas and Sergio Gutierrez presented their work at the 2023 Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) Conference in Los Angeles.

Prof. Kyle Lauersen joins Justine Dees as part of her podcast series Joyful Microbe in an episode entitled "Algae in Nature and Biotechnology".

Call for papers on the topic "Metabolic engineering/synthetic biology of eukaryotic microalgae for better light-driven biosynthesis and production" in the journal Algal Research.

Prof. Lauersen was appointed to the Editorial Board of the journal Planta, where he will handle manuscripts relating to algal biotechnology.

The SSB Lab hosted BESE Dean’s Distinguished Lecture entitled "From genetics parts to synthetic genomes" by Prof. Patrick Yizhi Cai from the University of Manchester.

Amna Abdulshakoor Abdullah, Master student in the SSB Lab, successfully defended her Bioengineering MSc thesis entitled "Heterologous expression of two ice binding proteins fro the chloroplast genome of a high-density cultivation enabled Chlamydomonas reinhardtii strain".

SSB Lab student Fatimah Abualsaud successfully defended today her Bioengineering MSc thesis entitled "Engineering volatile isoprene production from the polyextremophilic red microalga Cyanidioschyzon merolae".

A bioprospecting project led by Prof. Lauersen that involves testing the potential of microalgae native to the central Red Sea region for biotechnology applications, is featured in the KAUST INSIGHT magazine.

Professor Lauersen gave a Zoom seminar for the Davis College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at the Institute for Genomics for Crop Abiotic Stress Tolerance at Texas Tech University.

Prof. Kyle Lauersen gave an invited talk at Stanford's Carnegie Institution for Science, following an invitation from Dr. Adrien Burlacot.

Prof. Kyle Lauersen was honored to be invited to give a talk at Apeel Sciences in Santa Barbara (California) today. Apeel is a food biotech company that developed a method to prolongue the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by applying a "second peel" composed entirely of purified monoglycerides and diglycerides.

The SSB lab visitors Dr. Jeffrey Moseley and Prof. Peter Lammers both gave a BioE seminar talk this week. Jeffrey discussed his academic journey in his talk entitled "There and Back Again: Algae Biology and Biotechnology in Industry and Academia", while Peter presented his work on extemophilic microalgae in his seminar "Metabolic engineering with Microalgae: exploiting the versatility of polyextremophiles".

This week, the SSB group welcomed three academic collaborators to KAUST, including Dr. Jeffrey Moseley from UC Berkeley, and Dr. Mark Seger and Prof. Peter Lammers from the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation at Arizona State University.

SSB Lab research was presented by MSc students Fatimah Abdualsaud and Amna Abdullah, and by visiting highschool student Yazan Alflayyeh at the KAUST Research Open Week (KROW) poster session.

Prof Kyle Lauersen participated in the second EBRC Global Forum for Engineering Biology: Review of Synthetic Biology/Bioeconomy National Strategies (EBRC Global Forum 2.0), which was held on 20/21 February 2023 in Singapore in partnership with the Singapore Consortium for Synthetic Biology (SINERGY).

Professor Kyle Lauersen joins Julia Van Etten for her podcast series Tiny Living Beings in an episode entitled "Genetic engineering of algae".