Welcome  back  to  another  episode of  Big  Bioenergy, cracking  the  hottest  topics  in bioengineering  from  around  the  globe. I'm  your  host,  Hansen, a  four  year  PhD  student  in chemical  and  biological  engineering, and  I'm  joined  today by  two  fabulous  scientists. Please  introduce  yourselves.  Yep. Hi,  I'm  Toa,  sophomore recently  declared  in  CBD. Congrats  on  declaring.  I'm  Kelly, a  senior  in  CV  as  well. So  since  springs  here, I  recently  got  Ben  spoons  dark  chocolate. It's  so  simple,  yet  so  unbeatable. Yeah,  very  bad  take. Ben  Soon's  texture  is  pretty  much  on  point. Noche  to  halo  pulp,  of  course. Speaking  of  sweets, today's  topic  is  on  sugars. Right.  I  heard  you  guys have  been  cooking  up  something  really  big. How  a  super  thermophilic  microbe eats  plant  sugars?  Tell  me  more. So  ice  cream  contains a  few  sugars  like  lactose  or  sucrose, but  plant  biomass  is  made  up  of a  complex  mix  of many  sugars  like  xylose  and  cellulose. There's  this  one  thermophilic  bacterium that  grows  above  70  degrees Celsius  called  cellulose eruptorves  Cade  for  short. It  has  membrane  transporters for  almost  every  sugar  you  can  imagine, allowing  it  to  eat  all  of  these  sugars. I'm  sorry,  but  that's such  a  badass  name  for  a  bacterium, the  velociruptor  of  bacteria. I  know,  right? How  do  you  guys  approach  this  problem? Yeah,  we  start  with  the  genome. These  days,  it's  pretty  easy  to  pick out  sugar  transporter  genes. We  then  sequence  them  and  use alpha  fold  to  predict their  three  D  protein  structures. From  the  structure, we  examine  the  transporters binding  pocket  chemistry  like size,  shape,  and  charge. Then  we  run  molecular  simulations to  screen  which  sugar  fits  best. If  the  binding  is  favorable, that  sugar  is  probably  the right  match  for  the  transporter. We  rely  on  simulations  to  predict which  transporters  to  target  experimentally. For  instance,  we  predicted one  transporter  was  used  for the  major  blanche  sugar  and  cellulose. We  knocked  out  the  gene  cluster in  calde  and  voila. The  mutant  can't  grow  on  cellulose, no  transporter, no  cellulose  uptake,  no  growth. Well,  Calde  on a  forced  cellulose  diet,  that's  just  brutal. You  can  even  see  the  cells  on those  right  side  bottles  just  not  growing. So  this  is  really  cool.  Don't  get  me  wrong, but  what's  the  broader  impact? Biofuels. Hmm.  Say  more. For  decades,  we've  tried  to engineer  one  super  miicrobe to  break  down  biomass, eat  everything,  and  make  fuels. That's  like  asking  one  student to  ace  every  class, captain  the  flag  football  team, and  still  sleep  8  hours,  not  sustainable. Yeah.  Now  imagine  if  microbes  can team  up  one  strain  chops  biomass, another  fernts  them  into  biofuels, and  all  of  them  end  up  healthier. Deleting  sugar  transporters  ensures  they eat  different  sugars  and avoid  competing  for  growth. Teamwork  makes  the  dream  work. But  to  get  there, we  have  to  understand  the  function of  their  sugar  transporters in  the  first  place. Wow,  next  time  I  go  to  Ben  Spoon, I'll  have  to  think  about  bacterial velociraptors on  sugar  free  diets. Now,  for  our  viewers  out  there, if  you  like  the  sweet  science, hit  that  like  button. Let  us  know  their  favorite  ice cream  flavor  in  the  comments  below, and  have  a  great  Princeton  research  day.