Category Archives: Uncategorized

Congratulations to Ignacio and Dr. Burgess for publishing the first synthetic biology paper in the lab – a brief communication on a Golden Gate toolkit for continuous directed evolution in E. coli (but compatible with other photoautotrophic organisms 😉- stay tuned…). In this paper, we show that complex mutator plasmids can be assembled in underContinue reading “2025.07.13 PUBLICATION ALERT 🚨- Synthetic Biology”

Ryan Boyd (Burgess Lab postdoc and UIUC’s resident Licor wizard!) led a photosynthesis workshop for the RISE undergraduate interns, diving into the basics of photosynthesis and training them on how to collect and interpret gas exchange data using the LICOR-6800. Great discussions and thoughtful questions throughout. We hope it helps them as they begin theirContinue reading “2025.05.29 – Introducing RISE Interns to Photosynthesis Research”

Today, Farwah and Ignacio caught up on all the tip boxes they have been procrastinating on for several weeks. They manually filled up 100 boxes over a few grueling hours. We are #thankful for the undergrads who not only do amazing research but also help keep us running a tight ship.

Ignacio finished assembling his error prone PCR mutant library! He is working on directed evolution and comparing state-of-the-art methods, such as MLDE and continuous directed evolution, especially when applied to plant proteins. Here are some pictures from the journey: from transforming to maximize library diversity, pooling the colonies, and extracting all the DNA into aContinue reading “2025.03.27 – Mutant library for machine learning assisted directed evolution”

Delighted to announce the latest paper from the lab was published in The Plant Journal last month: https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.17219 In this paper we investigated the variation in photosynthetic efficiency and light capture in existing soybean genotypes. With a lot of help from Anthony Digrado from Lisa Ainsworth’s lab and Daniel Eck in the stats department weContinue reading “2025.02.20- Lab publication on photosynthetic efficiency”

Excited to have Ryan Boyd and Nic Austen join the team as part of the Center for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) at UIUC. Both come with a wealth of experience in plant physiology, biochemistry and processing of biomass. We’re delighted to have them both!

As this summer comes to an end, a big thank you to Farwah Wasiq – who did a fantastic job working with Ignacio over the summer as part of an iBio internship. As the new semester starts we welcome Sarah and Stephanie as graduate students, who will be starting to work on the regulation ofContinue reading “2024.08.21 A new term”

This summer we have been privileged to host three awesome undergrads as part of summer internship programs: Kelley Wilson (SROP), Jason Rivera (PRECS) and Gerardo Amaro (AAP) – along with IB Student Nick Lisa. Kelley, Jason and Gerardo have been investigating the molecular basis of photoprotection and gained experienced of performing a forward genetic screenContinue reading “2023.07.31 – Summer Stars”

A belated congratulations to Ignacio and Tim for publication of their review “Recent developments in the engineering of Rubisco activase for enhanced crop yield” in Biochemical Society Transactions! (their first co-first author publication) In this manuscript they surveyed the latest research into the structure, mechanism and regulation of Rubisco Activase, a protein which plays anContinue reading “2022.05.22 New publication – Congrats to Ignacio and Tim”

This week we celebrated successful completion of a 10 week summer project in our lab by undergrad extraordinare Chandra Davies. A community college student, Chandra joined us as part of the NSF Funded PRECS REU at UIUC. Thrown the task of establishing a protocol for photosynthesis measurements of the unicellular green alga Ostreococcus tauri, sheContinue reading “2022.08.02 Summer farewell”