33. Rooted for Resilience w/ Jenn Brophy

In this episode of EBRC in Translation, we speak with Jenn Brophy, an assistant professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Jenn discusses her journey into plant synthetic biology, including how she transitioned from microbial synthetic biology and her motivation to increase female representation in academia. The conversation explores the current research directions of the Brophy lab, the technical and regulatory challenges in engineering plants versus bacteria, and the potential future of agricultural and environmental resilience through genetic engineering. Additionally, they delve into practical sustainability practices in research labs, teaching synthetic biology to high school students through the National Education Equity Lab, and broader efforts to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the synthetic biology community.

Note:
Please check back for updates about attending SEED 2026. During the episode, Jenn describes helpful ways to create a more sustainable lab. Find these helpful tips about designing a more sustainable lab with My Green Lab.

For more information about EBRC:

Visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!

Transcription:
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to EBRC in translation. We are a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Ross Jones, a postdoc and Peter Sanchez lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Today we're joined by Jen Brophy, assistant professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University.

We're actually having a bit of a Boston Bash today with Rona currently at Tufts, and Jen and I previously working on adjacent floors at MIT. So thank you so much, Jen, for joining us today. 

Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. 

Awesome. So to start off, can you tell us about your journey to becoming a professor and what drew you to plant synthetic biology in particular?

Sure. I started thinking about becoming a professor when I was in grad school. It looked around and noticed that there weren't a lot of female faculty doing synthetic biology research, especially at [00:01:00] MIT at the time, and thought that it would be fun to try to apply to see if I could change that.

Either by coming, becoming faculty myself or just by having another application in the pile that was from a woman. So I got interested in pursuing this faculty career, but didn't know exactly what type of research I wanted to do. I was. Working on microbial synthetic biology as a grad student and towards the end of my PhD trying to show that we could use this tool that I had developed for transforming undomesticated strains of bacteria to produce useful probiotics.

And the tool worked really well with soil bacteria, which had me thinking about plant probiotics. And I kind of got interested in, you know, what we could do with. Bacteria to improve plant health and realized that it would be really hard to use just a microbe to improve plant [00:02:00] health. A lot of engineered bacteria don't compete well in the environment.

Have a hard time producing chemicals at like high enough quantity to really impact plant growth. Though there are notable exceptions to that. And. I thought, okay, well if we really wanna make an impact in, in agriculture, then we should be engineering the plants instead. And so that kind of was the thought process by which I like decided to look for a postdoc in plants.

But yeah, it wasn't by no means like a sure, sure bet or sure thing. 

Cool. Yeah, that's, that's a interesting like transition that you were making there. So now that you're a professor in sort of moving forward, what's your like grand vision for what your lab will do and the sort of research threads that your lab is starting to pursue?

Yeah, so we're pursuing two main research threads. One is purely in plants. I got really interested in how plants [00:03:00] determine their size and shape. I think if you look across know plants as a whole, you, there's like this incredible breath, right? You have these really, really tiny flowering plants to like huge redwood trees and.

All of those sizes and shapes the structures that plants make turn out to be important for their ability to survive in different environments. Unlike animals plants can't run away if the environment starts to become challenging, right? You can't go seek shade if it gets to be too hot, for example. So plants have to do other things and they'll respond by changing the way they grow. So I got interested in trying to figure out like, okay, can we control this? Can we control these growth programs and really design plants? For us, we're interested in doing that so that the plants could be more environmentally resilient.

But I think there are a lot of other reasons why you might wanna engineer the size and shape of plants. So we're going after kind of synthetic genetic [00:04:00] control over plant development, which changes the size and shape of a plant. And then starting to pick up some. Plant microbiome research.

Basically trying to incorporate what I learned as a graduate student into a lab where we have this capacity to engineer plants. And so we're working on engineering, both like the plant and the microbe to kind of work together to improve, you know, resilience to environmental or abiotic stress. 

Very cool.

Can I pick up a little bit on this plant development question? I think it's really interesting. And I've heard you talk before about plant development and animal development and sort of the connections between them. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about commonalities in plant and animal development and what makes plants an attractive platform for learning to engineer development sort of more broadly.

Yeah. I think plants are really interesting because they kind of continuously develop, so a lot of [00:05:00] animal development happens or is like preset early. You get body plans that are defined by the embryo and then, regardless of the environment that your animal grows up in, it's going to have a very recognizable and consistent body plan, whereas a plant kind of continuously develops new organs.

So like the equivalent of this would be like a person continuing to grow new legs as they needed to run faster. Right. Plants have this capacity to continue to grow new roots if they need to access more water or new leaves, if they need to access more sunlight. So there's this kind of continuous development that's happening and that makes it really interesting to use plants as a platform for studying development because you're not constrained to this really difficult to access time point in the.

Organisms development, you kind of continuously watch them create new [00:06:00] organs and some of the high level processes that define organ development are conserved in plants and mammals or animals. For example, you can get morphogen gradients that define where a specific organ is going to emerge or a specific feature is going to develop.

You get oscillations in hormones that lead to regular patterning of specific things. So, so might patterning, for example, in vertebrates, this is like regular oscillations. In hormones that give you the patterning of somites and in roots as they grow. For example, you also get oscillations of a hormone that regularly patterns stem cells that would then grow out into lateral roots, sort of the same way in which some somites grow out into, and into vertebra versus cartilage. So I think, you know, there's just, there are many analogies, many places where these things are, are similar and plants are a nice system for getting to [00:07:00] explore that. And specifically if you're doing genetic engineering it's great because you can make whole transgenic organisms really readily in plants.

I know a lot of people talk about how slow plant systems can be, but. Relative to making a mouse where you've engineered some developmental process plants are pretty easy to engineer and they're also pretty resilient. And so if you make a change in development, that completely messes up the.

Production of an organ, the plant will often try to figure out how to limp along. You can completely, for example, abolish its ability to make roots, but it will, the seeds will still usually germinate and grow for a little while before dying, which gives you plant material or, or biological material to study.

Whereas an embryonic, lethal phenotype in a mouse, like that's really challenging for you to get any information from. And so I just think, yeah, there's a lot of. Cool things you [00:08:00] can do with plants. And drawing that connection to human development can be helpful in just getting people to pay more attention to plants, I think.

Yeah, that's really crazy and cool and interesting what you were saying about these like partially lethal phenotypes and plants. I never really thought about, you know, what these types of knockouts would look like in a plant. And now I'm just imagining all kinds of crazy looking plants. It's 

really wild.

Cre you can randomly muta anize plants just by the process of transforming them. And so you have mm-hmm. Often to be on the lookout for all these crazy phenotypes. 

That's really cool. Can you talk a little bit about how this works? Look, can we dive down a little bit into the details? So you build circuits and you interface them somehow with plant development.

What does that look like? You know, from the synthetic biology angle? 

Yeah, the interfacing with plant development's actually pretty simple. [00:09:00] Work that we've done so far has been focused on refining, where within a plant you're expressing a specific gene. So we're trying to generate essentially new tissue specific patterns of gene expression.

And we don't define all those patterns de novo. Instead what we do is we take promoters that are on already in specific tissues in the plant, and we use them to drive expression of synthetic transcription factors that then turn on and off expression at synthetic promoters to kind of do this circuit.

Based computation and express some sort of output. Gene I had been asked before, like, you know, do you generate all these spatial patterns de novo, and if so, how do you do it? And like the answer is definitely no at this point, right? We just take advantage of, of these native tissue specific promoters.

Then we try to combine their activity in different ways. One thing that was a big adjustment [00:10:00] for me in moving from bacteria into these multicellular systems was understanding that often tissue specific promoters, even though we use that phrasing isn't quite right. It's more like tissue enriched. So a lot of these promoters are on really strongly in certain tissues, but then have some lower baseline activity and other tissues and are completely off.

And other ones, there's. There's a lot more to it than just saying like, this promoter is on in, in epithelial cells, for example. And so we kind of take advantage of some of that squishiness and say like, okay, in tissues where this promoter is like sort of slightly on. If we combine the activity of that tissue specific promoter with another one using this circuit, then we can turn on gene expression just in epithelial cells of this variety, for example.

Mm-hmm. 

So that's kind of how we're like building circuits to define patterns of expression. You could [00:11:00] imagine using the same type of approach to combine tissue specificity within an environmental response by building and gates, for example, that incorporate these input promoters of a different variety.

This really is just taken from the same page as a lot of synthetic biology. That's done in microbial systems where you have inducible promoters driving expression of your circuit components. Right. Just instead of it being an IPTG inducible promoter, now it's this like tissue specific promoter. But I think you also asked about how we would you interface that with development?

Is that true? Mm-hmm. Or am I putting Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So to interface these circuits with plant development, we have taken advantage of these naturally occurring gain of function Developmental regulators, these are proteins that occasionally become mutated in a plant and they have been [00:12:00] identified because when they become mutated, the plants structure their size, their shape changes really aggressively.

That's because the mutant regulators become hormone unresponsive. Usually these regulators would respond to a increase in a morphogen or a plant hormone and become degraded, allowing for de repression of the expression of these developmental genes. But the mutant versions of them become insensitive to the hormone.

They never get degraded. They continue to repress the development of all these plant. Plant developmental genes. And so we take advantage of those and we use those to override developmental cues. And we control really precisely like where within a plant they're expressed. And that's been a really impactful strategy for us for trying to use a synthetic genetic system to kind of override a plant.

You know, kind of native developmental tendencies [00:13:00] without having to make a bunch of knockouts in the plant background. 

Yeah. Very cool. And what you were saying about sort of these tissue specific promoters, quote unquote. Definitely like similar vibes in human development and yeah, very cool to see the sort of connections there.

I mean as, as both sort of eukaryotic systems, I think that there naturally is a lot of kind of commonality and how genes are regulated and how different tissues are regulated and so on. I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate a little bit more. You started talking about sort of plants versus bacteria.

Maybe we could dive into some unique things about plants. So is there anything sort of unique about plants as far as engineering goes? The actual gene editing, for example, or the way that you would design a circuit that people would be interested in? 

Yeah, I, I mean, I think the major differences in implants and bacteria are the obvious ones, right?

It's multicellular. It's [00:14:00] eukaryotic. So you have organelles and other challenges with kind getting expression of your genes. One of the unique things about working in plants that I didn't appreciate was that we don't have great methods for choosing where transgenes integrate into the genome.

And that means that every experiment that you do, where you transform in your new circuit, your new synthetic genetic construct, whatever lands randomly in the plant genome. And that can change expression levels. It can change or accidentally knock out genes that are, you know, important for, for the plant to grow, but only under specific conditions so you don't always notice right away.

This is kind of similar to, as I understand it, how lentivirus works for working with human cell lines, where it kinda randomly puts your transgenes into the genome. And [00:15:00] I just, that was such a huge adjustment for me because coming from bacteria where you can either have these plasmas that are extra chromosomal and not interfering with native gene expression, or you have methods for being able to put your genes of interest and you can use Lambda to put it into a specific location that was really hard.

The way that people approach that in plants is just by averaging gene expression over multiple independent lines. So that means you get seeds, transgenic seeds resulting from a transformation where each seed has your transgenes integrated in a different location. And then to look at the impact of your transgenes on the plant feature that you wanna measure, let's say its height.

I don't know. Then you would grow up all those seeds and average their height and compare it to the unedited or un engineered version. And that sucks for quantitative gene [00:16:00] expression control because you can't readily assess the impact of a change in a promoter region, a change that's supposed to have a very specific.

Effect on gene expression level very readily, unless that effect on gene expression level is really massive and is going to overcome this positional effect. And I'd say that's like a huge challenge for doing synthetic biology implants. You either need to work with modifications that are going to have a really big impact or you know, figure out how to painstakingly sites specifically integrate your genes of interest, which really there aren't great methods for right now.

Hmm. Yeah, that definitely sounds like a challenge. So going back to bacteria a little bit, you mentioned that you also do some work with sort of the microbiome of the plant. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you're doing there and how do you decide to engineer the bacteria associated with the plant or the plant itself?

Yeah, it's a really good [00:17:00] question. And it's not an easy one to answer. Most of my labs we're two and a half years in Right now. Most of the projects in the lab are plant engineering projects. It's been much easier for us to. Figure out what we can do that's unique when working with plants than with when working with bacteria.

Just because there are a lot more people who can do bacterial manipulations or want to do bacterial manipulations. So we've been slowly kind of moving into some microbial stuff. Right now what we're doing is working with synthetic communities, basically trying to define a kind of set of bacteria that grow well with our plant species of interest.

And then using them as handles to ask different questions about how the behavior of the bacteria in the microbiome can affect a plant's ability to tolerate abiotic stress. There's some examples that show [00:18:00] that if you kind of pre-treat. A microbiome or a community of microbes with an abiotic stressor like heat, for example.

If you like heat, treat your microbial community and you kind of evolve it under these high heat conditions, then as you inoculate those microbes. To a plant, then that plant might have a better chance at surviving high heat conditions. The mechanisms behind how that work are totally unclear or mostly unclear.

And we're kind of interested in exploring and teasing out some of that. Now, how do you choose whether to work with the microbe or work with the plant? I, at this point, I don't know that we have a great strategy. I'd say like canonically or in the field. People think that if you want to be able to rapidly.

Alter something. If you wanna have a lot of modularity, then you wanna mo modify the microbes because it's faster to change a microbe than it is to change a plant. So if you think you're gonna need [00:19:00] like rapid adaptation or something like that, maybe you would work with a microbe. But yeah, exactly where they're going to shine and where the plants are going to shine.

I, I don't have a great answer for that. We're kind of exploring on both fronts and hoping that as we gain more experience working with both, we'd have a better answer to that question. 

Really interesting. The, the thing you mentioned about like the temperature effect is again, just, just wild to me, crazy how the, how these systems can interact with each other.

Super interesting. So thinking a little bit further on, so where do you see this going? Like what, what's really exciting to you about the long-term prospects for plants and bio? Are we gonna be growing chairs? Like some people have said, 

oh my gosh, I would love to be growing chairs. So one of the things is like, you probably could grow a chair.

Now. There have been some really incredible work just training plants, right? Like people have been doing this for a long time where you come in [00:20:00] and you just. Bend the, like young plant material like branches that are relatively flexible still, and you kind of artificially keep them in place. And then as the plant branches mature, you can get them to, to grow into whatever shape you want.

So in theory, you could do that now genetically programming it to just grow that way without intervention. As I think more what you're talking about and would be really cool, I mean. Part of what we're pushing towards in controlling size and shape of plants would be useful for something like that.

So I would love to see that. I think, you know, in the really short term, synthetic biology in plants is going to help us develop better sensors, better methods of controlling patterns of gene expression in the plant, which I'm hoping will let us move beyond what we've been doing with plants in agriculture.

With genetic engineering so far, which is to [00:21:00] constitutively over express an individual gene. And you know, being able to do that has led us create, you know, pesticide or herbicide resistant plants, but it's really limited in terms of the type of capabilities that you can introduce into a plant. Certain features that are.

Multigenic, they're really complex and they're regulated by the correct expression of a gene in a specific tissue at a specific time. And so if you wanna do something like modify environmental stress resilience, it's probably not gonna be from constituent of overexpression of a single gene. There's one example where Bay tried to make what's called drought guard maze, where they over express a single bacterial protein throughout.

A maze plant and say that it increases drought resilience. And results from that are sort of mixed, but it would be great, I think to express genes just in the right tissues and times to, to get better [00:22:00] drought resilience phenotypes. And that's where I'm thinking synthetic biology could be really helpful because that's what we're good at, right?

Is there's that tighter control over gene expression. And there's a lot of evidence to suggest that. Yeah, like modifying some of those features is going to require the capacity to not just globally, over express or globally knock out a gene, but to control really precisely where things are going. So we're, we're focused on environmental resilience. But I think the approaches could be applied in a number of different areas and seeing kind of more fun things like chair trees or tree houses I think has another thing people have put would be really, 

yeah. So we, just to follow up on something you're saying, I mean, the whole.

Going from engineering sort of one gene to multiple genes reminds me a lot of. The sort of cell therapy landscape as well where, you know, it's exciting to think about what Symbio can [00:23:00] do for engineering immune cells. This is sort of what my realm is, so I'll try not to dive into this too much. Yeah. But there's this sort of barrier where you know, if we engineer the cells too much, we might run into a sort of FDA problem.

I was curious in plans if you have a sort of similar sort of. Regulatory barriers that you're sort of gonna have to push through, or if plants, plant engineering might be a little bit more amenable to Yeah. Doing more sophisticated gene editing and getting that into sort of production. 

So we're, we're definitely gonna have regulatory problems and I think, you know.

Pushback against genetically modified plants is, has been a big deal globally and different countries have come down or are moving even in different directions on approval or willingness to approve genetically modified plants for growth and human consumption. I think [00:24:00] so far we haven't seen any.

Thing come forward for regulatory approval that is more complicated than just knockout of one or two genes or constitutive overexpression of one gene. And so we don't know what the regulatory path would look like for kind of a plant containing a more. Complex synthetic genetic system. But all the pieces are sort of there, right?

Like there is approval of constitutively over expressed genes and the parts that you would use in a synthetic genetic system are, are pretty similar to what has been approved already, probably. So, you know, I think there's reason to hope that you would be able to get approval for it, but we don't know exactly what the approval process would look like.

And we don't know how far globally you could really do that. I mean, the food system is global at this point, right? And so things grown in the [00:25:00] US are often shipped around the world and vice versa. So how other countries would react to synthetic biology in their agricultural crops isn't clear, but would play a role I think in how much in how.

It's adopted in the us like how many people grow it and, and kind of like what profits look like for stuff like that. So I'm not sure. I mean, I personally, I think, you know, the regulations are, are interesting. I would love to see regulations move in a direction that is more product. Driven, then process driven.

So much of it is about the method by which you've made a genetic modification to a plant. So like transgenes, transgenes, like overexpression of of transgenes is regulated one way, but CRISPR knockouts are regulated a different way. And different countries will regulate one but not the other. And there's just like all this focus on how you [00:26:00] produced a plant that has a new and useful feature.

When I think what we would. Ideally be paying attention to is what the plants were engineered to do and how that impacts the ecology and kind of. Human practices surrounding agriculture, right? Like if you introduce a pest resistance gene or pesticide resistance gene, does that mean you're spraying more pesticide?

How does that impact people versus if you've engineered something to change nutritional content in the seed, then you know, how does that impact people? And I would love to see regulations focus more on that side than on the ME mechanism. Genetic mechanism by which you made the modification. Yeah, makes 

total sense, but who knows?

Mm-hmm. Well, fingers crossed on that. So let's say that this goes really well and we are sort of living in the sustainable solar punk future where, you know, what sort of role do you think engineered [00:27:00] plants and, and commensal organisms are gonna play, and what technical challenges do we need to overcome to get there?

I love this solar punk future as a concept. The, I think plants can play a ton of different roles depending on how rapidly we can use genetic engineering to develop climate resilient plants and how rapidly the climate changes in ways that necessitate them. I think that we could see them as being a very important part of maintaining the.

Food system that keeps our global population fed and clothed and housed and able to have medicines. We rely on plants for so many different things that I think just fortifying our agricultural systems with some genetic engineering could be a major way in which it contributes and it would be sort of silent relative to, you know, growing.

[00:28:00] Tree houses in that it probably wouldn't change your day to day much, but would allow you to kind of continue to live and eat and all of these things in a way that you're accustomed to instead of having to really. Adopt a kind of climate driven new diet. So I think there's that. I, you know, love these new glowing plants that have come out and the kind of tomatoes that have high antioxidants.

I think there are definitely some areas where you could see like value add instead of just a kind of status quo maintenance. And those would be really fun to see. I would love to have a plant nightlight. And, yeah. Kind of rainbow of fruits and vegetables to feed my kids that are all, you know, palatable to a three-year-old.

That I think that would be really fun. Biggest challenges though to, to overcome, I mean. From the technical side, the [00:29:00] design, build, test, learn cycle and plants is still really long. It would be great to have some approaches that would enable more rapid innovation. There are groups that work on just different methods of growing plants that allow them to cycle through their lifecycle faster.

So if you, for example, stress out. Some varieties of plants will respond to stress by producing seed earlier than they might otherwise. And this is a strategy that they've adopted because they're saying like, okay, my environment is bad, but if I make seeds, maybe conditions will change for my progeny and they'll be able to survive or thrive in a way that I'm not able to.

So you can. Integrate some of those methods with some kind of rapid prototyping methods and maybe try to accelerate some plant engineering. But each of those things kind of have challenges associated with them, so it's not. Clear exactly how you can accelerate this design build, test cycle. Especially when [00:30:00] what you're trying to introduce to a plant is a feature that requires expression at a specific developmental stage or time.

Like you really need to grow the whole plant throughout its life cycle to assess it. So we need to do that. And then, you know, there's a bunch of challenges with cultural acceptance, right? We need to decide or agree on where, and you know. Where we wanna be able to grow genetically engineered plants how comfortable we are with using them for different types of applications.

So are you comfortable wearing clothes that were made from transgenic cotton plants, but not comfortable with like consuming. Produce that was made with genetic engineering. I, again, would push for understanding kind of what the modification to that plant was intended to do before deciding whether or not the extra DNA in the plant is a problem.

But, you know, that is a very real barrier to [00:31:00] acceptance and to seeing genetically engineered plants have a big impact in the future. Cool. 

So. Now let's transition a little bit. You know, a lot of your work is sort of focused on sustainability, I guess in the broader sense for our world, but at the local sense in your lab, you've done a lot of work to make your operations more sustainable as well, and you've put out some resources to help other research labs do the same.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your team has done for sort of lab sustainability and any insights you have for other groups trying to do the same. 

Sure. I'm gonna ask you, Ross, like how much plastic do you go through in a day in lab? 

Oh, you don't wanna know how many tips?

I'm probably gonna use on Friday to do some staining. So, yeah, a lot. 

Yeah. That pile of plastic to me is, is really tough because, you know, we talk a lot about trying to. Develop new technologies to help [00:32:00] with sustainability, but generate so much waste in the process that it, it was like, I don't know, kind of demoralizing.

I, I'm not really sure how to describe it, but I knew when I set up my lab that I wanted to at least implement whatever best practices were out there for lab, wet lab sustainability. I just asked, started asking people like, what do you do? Like, how do you reduce the number of tips or plastic waste or like other types of, of.

Waste in the lab. And there it turns out are a lot of people that, that think about this, that think about this even a lot more than we do. So what we did was try to implement some easier solutions that other researchers have come up with. I had questions about like, you know, using glass culture tubes, for example, where in California.

And so I wanted to know like, okay, is is glass that we have to sterilize and wash and use water to, to do both of those things. Worth [00:33:00] it? Like, or is it, is it actually better to just use this single use plastic or try to find plastic that we could recycle? Like what, how do we think about these problems?

'cause they're big and they're kind of multidimensional. And so there. Are some people who will help you kind of run through some of those calculations, or at least tell you like what they think about it. Turns out Stanford uses has a big solar farms and has a lot of renewable energy. In fact, they try to offset all of the energy used on campus with the solar farms and use a lot of gray water for you know, flushing toilets and.

Doing other things on campus. And so it turned out to be useful to actually have glass tubes, but I wanted to know kinda how to think about these problems. Yeah, so we, we have, we, we've got a list of kind of advice and, and things range and how easy they are to implement from like, you know, start [00:34:00] recycling your gloves, their glove recycling programs.

Understand where your plastic waste goes and whether the tip boxes that you've used can be actually recycled or are being collected in recycling. And then, you know, not recycled, just put into landfill somewhere else. 'cause maybe that would. Sway you to think about other things to do with those tip boxes.

Like use them for storage, give them a way to people who might have a lot of things, small things like craft materials that they wanna store in them or something. If I could give advice to people, I guess it would just be to, to. Implement something, anything, even if it's small. You don't have to, don't let like perfect, be the enemy of good in this case.

Like you don't have to solve every problem in your lab. But you know, if you can convince everyone to try turning up the ultra low temperature freezer to minus 70 instead of minus 80, you can make a small [00:35:00] impact in how much energy your lab is using without some kind of complete overhaul. So. 

Yeah, that's fantastic advice and, and thanks again for putting those resources out there.

It's so helpful when somebody just does it for everyone else. You, you mentioned crafts. I'd like to follow up on that. I heard you are really into arts and crafts and just wanna know what do you like to make and do you sort of see a connection between this hobby and your work and career? 

I love making everything.

If it, if it's got markers or paint or glitter or yarn or clay, like I, I wanna be there and I wanna play with it. I'm not particularly great at any of it, but I really enjoy the process of trying to make art. I actually. Got into synthetic biology because of art. I think it, when I was an undergrad and kind of looking around it, it was one of the more [00:36:00] creative fields that I saw.

And I was a like, so. I got into synthetic biology because I saw this article in the school newspaper about LS nine which was like a Bay Area company. I was at Berkeley at the time as an undergrad, but I was trying to make jet fuel with bacteria and I thought that was really cool. And so I was like, what is this discipline where you could try to make jet fuel and bacteria and, you know, kind of emailed Chris Anderson, who is a professor at Berkeley and was like, can I do research in your lab? You do synthetic biology. And he put me on the I GM team at Berkeley and we went to I gm and you know, I was into it, you know, I liked the research, but I wasn't, you know, we wasn't working on anything biofuel related and I wasn't.

Totally sure what I wanted to do. But he found this team at I GM that had is now I think pretty famous, the Eide team [00:37:00] that made the e coli strains that all produce a different like colored pigment with this idea that you would like. Have these bacteria living in your gut and they would detect specific disease states and color your poo.

Different colors. Right. And so they had all these like colorful strains of bacteria and they had these little like mockup poos where they like had them different colors, but they also used these strains to make agri art where they were drawing stuff. And in 2009 when I was an undergrad, I'd never seen something like that before and I thought it was so cool and that team won I Gem and I was like.

God, this is awesome. This is a discipline where they are celebrating kind of this super creative pretty artistic. Project and I was sold. I think at that point, none of my research has gone really hard into crafts. But we'd say like one of the satisfying things about working with these, with plants, with these whole like multicellular organisms [00:38:00] is getting to really see the effect of the engineering that you're doing in this tangible way.

Like it's really. Satisfying to me to see like the changes in plant structure in a way that like seeing populations of cells move in a flow cytometry plot. It, it was not right. Like, I mean it was, but, but not quite the same. So,

mm-hmm. Yeah. 

I'm just imagining it's all kind of linked 

multi pigmented plants.

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the reporters that we use has become really popular in plants is a it's a three enzyme pathway to produce betalin, which is a compound that makes beets red. Hmm. And people use it as this visual reporter in plants. And it is stunning and super fun to express because you can see it color, specific tissues, this bright red it's really satisfying.

Yeah, that does sound. So, so switching gears again we recently had [00:39:00] an interview with Drew Andy actually, and he mentioned that you two are working with the National Education Equity Lab to bring Stanford's intro to bioengineering course to high school students. So I wonder if you could talk a, to us a little bit about how the project got started, how it's going, and any insights you have for communicating about synthetic biology and bioengineering to high schoolers.

I am so grateful to be working with Drew on this project. He really had mastermind it before I started at Stanford. I basically like. You know, had my first day as an assistant professor and he was like, okay, we're teaching this class together and I wanna teach it as this National Education Equity Lab class.

And I had no idea what it was, but he had already kind of set some things in motion in order to get this class taught through the National Education Equity Lab to all of these high school students. And he wanted to do this because there were no [00:40:00] life sciences classes, I believe offered through the ed equity lab.

And he wanted, you know, more people to be doing bioengineering, doing synthetic biology. It has been wild though to adopt this class for the ED Equity Lab. You know, the, the second year I taught it, we were recording all of these lectures to send to these high schools, trying to coordinate this teaching team of incredible Stanford alumni to work with each high school class and kind of be there to answer questions about the lectures and problem sets and all of this.

And I felt like I still barely knew what we were trying to achieve with the class. Right? Like I know it was introducing bioengineering, but bioengineering means so many different things to so many different people. And how to focus that into a class that was both going to teach the students something but also.

Show them the breadth of the discipline [00:41:00] and get them excited about kind of pursuing this type of work. Was, is really challenging, right? Like, 'cause you, you're sometimes sacrificing depth for breath or vice versa. And so I think what we've learned is that one, the high school students that we work with are incredible.

A lot of them have taken what was a little bit of a messy go the first time around and just like, loved it. Worked hard to kinda, connect what they were learning in the class to their, their own lives. One of my favorite little activities that we have them do is think about how new medicines are developed and how, like you can observe something happening and then try to figure out why that works.

We, we talk about the discovery basically like historical discovery of, of certain small molecule drugs and, them kind of looking at, okay, well what does my mom do for me when I have a cold? Is there like a scientific basis behind it? And seeing them kind of dig into to that stuff [00:42:00] was really cool.

I think I've lost the plot and like the question that you asked, I think you could talk about the ed equity lab for a while. It's going pretty well. We have, you know, had 150 something students take the class with us the first time and we're looking forward to having more. And yeah, just continuing to grow and learn.

I think you did ask like what is effective or, or what works well for teaching kind of this style of class and I think enthusiasm, it really, really helps, you know, drew, this is one of the reasons why Drew's been fabulous to to teach with. He's just so good at inspiring people and getting them like excited and, and wanting to dig in for more details.

Like trying to close that kind of breadth depth divide has been easier with him because he inspires people to want to close it. So. I don't know. It's good. All our teaching materials [00:43:00] for that class are online, so if people want to, you can see like what we've been trying to, to teach these students, and if you have comments or suggestions, then we'd love to hear them.

You can interact with the LLM that was trained for the class and ask it questions like there's just, yeah, it's fun. 

That's amazing. Super cool. I gotta say what you said about Drew. Totally true. When I was an undergrad, I saw a lecture that Drew gave and it blew me away. So very, very cool that those students get to experience him and also you as well where I, I've seen you give some great talks as well.

So thanks. I also really liked what you said earlier sort of your personal story of. Women in academia and wanting to sort of put yourself out there. And I'm really glad to see that things have been working out well for you and you know, you have a professor job now, it's fantastic. I was wondering if you had any sort of insights.

EBRC is dedicated to [00:44:00] creating an inclusive synthetic biology community and you know, for trainees, for people in the spa. Is there anything. Sort of that we should be doing to help embrace and enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion within sort of our community, within the field more broadly? 

Yeah. I think being open and honest about experiences is one thing that can be really helpful in just like being.

Clear about like what you've experienced can, can kinda help people understand like what to expect for like enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think following through on support, basically putting your time where your mouth is is, is really helpful. Like, you know, don't just talk about it, but actually like.

Make some of the changes that you wanna see. You may not get it right the first time, but you can push for you know, change to [00:45:00] happen. I, you know, I wanted to. To take on this role to try to push for more women in academia. And I just came off of sort of a maternity leave type thing. I had my second kid two years into starting my academic career and learned a lot in this process.

I'd say like there are some ways in which like, you know, I. University and department had been super supportive in other ways in which I wish I had advocated for myself more for new things. And I think one of the ways I'd like to try to enhance or like fulfill that role or, or work on that role of trying to get more women in academia is just like to help advocate the next time there's an assistant professor that's like.

Interested in having a baby and, and being like, okay, like, you know, push back on these things like you can, this is what you should do. I think that's, that's helpful. If there are, are programs like Ed Equity Lab or like there are these excellent [00:46:00] teaching programs all over the world, like find one that resonates with you and, and get involved, right?

Like if these things are important, then make time for it now. 'cause you can always say like, oh, I'm gonna do this later. I'm gonna do it once my, I pass my qualifying exam, or once my paper is written, or after I get this fellowship. But there's always gonna be something. So if you wanna do it, like make time for it now.

Yeah. Here, here to that. Awesome. So I think we're just to the end now, and you know, this has been a really fun talk, Jen. Thanks again for coming on. Before we go, are there any things you'd like to promote? For example, any DEI efforts, research openings in your lab, papers, books that you'd like us to put on on our podcast description?

Oh yeah. So many things first. Like, thanks so much for having me. It was really fun to talk today. I love all of the questions that you guys prepared. Yeah, so this summer we're, we're doing a plant synthetic biology hackathon. [00:47:00] So if you're interested in plant synthetic biology, but don't really know where to start or what to do, you should check this out. This is something that Nicola Patron and I, along with like a committee of people are putting together, and the idea is that we would teach you like some basics about plant synthetic biology and then you would compete in teams to design a genetically modified plant and, the winners of the hackathon will actually get free DNA synthesis of their designs from Twist. Twist is sponsoring this in addition to fleet free transformation of those plasmids into Maze which is non-trivial, like each transformation, several thousand dollars usually, and, and quite a lot of time.

But the Iowa State Plant Transformation Center is willing to do this for us. And so, you know, if you have interest in getting into this, this is one way to do it. It would be fun to have more people. We're also, I'm helping to organize seed this year, the synthetic biology [00:48:00] conference, and I think it's gonna be a great lineup of speakers.

So, you know, please come to seed. And then, you know, the, the other thing I wanted to push is just like, for those sustainability tips, like I didn't come up with most of them. My green lab has like a l of excellent resources for people to read when thinking about what they could do in a wet lab in order to enhance sustainability.

So I suggest like checking that out. It's a good resource that can point you in a lot of other look directions. So good place to start too. 

Awesome. Fantastic. So thanks again for coming on and for this fantastic interview. And we'll close it there. So this has been another episode of EBRC in translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association.

For more information about EBRC, visit our website@ebrrc.org. If you're a student or postdoc and wanna get involved with the e BRC Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode [00:49:00] description. A big thank you to the rest of the EBRC SPA podcast team Andrew Hunt, David Mai, Heidi Kpa, Will Gru, Matt Williams and Ice Sean p Kiata Siwi.

Thanks also to EBRC for their support and to you, our listeners for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.