Advait Holkar receives the APS Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) award
Recognizing research excellence.
Advait Holkar, a PhD. student at the Srivastava lab at UCLA and a BioPACIFIC MIP researcher, recently received the Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) award, conferred by the soft matter community (DSOFT) at the American Physical Society March Meeting 2023. His work demonstrates how synthetic biology can be leveraged to create simplified "protocells", optimized for the sole purpose of enzymatic catalysis. These protocells provide high local enzyme concentrations, giving ~25x faster reaction rates for single enzyme reactions compared to free enzymes. For enzyme cascade reactions, co-localization of enzymes reduces the accumulation of intermediates, further increasing reaction rates. This work was done at the Living BioFoundry (LBF) at CNSI and is supported by BioPACIFIC MIP.
