Pablo Iván Nikel
Professor and Group Leader
Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby
Biography
Building synthetic metabolism to make novel molecules (e.g. organohalogens) in environmental bacteria for a sustainable future.
Smart metabolic engineering strategies are urgently needed to tackle current limitations of bio-based production. Our team creates and assembles novel (synthetic) metabolism to explore bio-production beyond Nature’s restrictions, instead of merely collecting known pathways and enzymes to produce a few simple molecules.
The Systems Environmental Microbiology (SEM) group expands bio-production beyond Nature’s boundaries by exploiting unique characteristics of Pseudomonas putida, a non-pathogenic environmental bacterium that we use as a cell factory.
Organohalogens
We aim at increasing the type, number and nature of chemicals produced in engineered microbes by rationally incorporating non-biological atoms into the «metabolic agenda» of environmental bacteria.
