Pablo Iván Nikel
Senior Researcher and Group Leader
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.
