Natalie Kuldell (00:03):
Hi Jason, how are you? I’m so glad that you can join and thank you so much. I really appreciate it. We have been having these career conversations with people who are doing really interesting things in synthetic biology and biological engineering and you are one of them. Plus you are a big member of the bio builder community already. We got to see each other virtually yesterday at the BioBuilderClub Final Assembly. Maybe we can start there. Do you want to start by talking about your BioBuilderClub team that you’ve been shepherding?
Jason Boock (00:39):
Yes. So our BioBuilderClub team they’re from Indonesia and they’ve been working primarily on plastic degradation. And so they’ve been coming up with you know, solutions to this. And I think there’s been a lot of bio builder interests in plastic remediation and plastic degradation, but I think they have a unique sort of take on this because I think they’re really trying to develop strategies that they can implement in their community. And they actually have funding from the government to do this as well as sort of a lot of buy-in from sort of the stakeholders in the area to be able to find these solutions. And I think they’ve come up with some great ones. So, so Raina is studying how a specific fungus. I think it’s oyster basically one of the strains of oyster mushroom can grow on different plastic materials.
Jason Boock (01:33):
And so she’s actually gone through and cultured this, this oyster mushroom on top of plastic samples and watched it grow and basically then went through and did tensile testing to actually see, did the plastic end up becoming more degraded over time. And so she did that study, I think about a year ago. And then unfortunately the pandemic shut down all of her research abilities to be able to go in and do that. So we, we created a strategy of doing some bioinformatics on this mushroom, so we’ve gone through, and she found the genomic sequence of the mushroom, right? And she’s put forth a hypothesis of a couple of different enzyme classes that might be involved in ENS or the degradation of this plastic material, including a lactase enzyme. And then she was able to go through and find other lackeys enzymes by looking at a database of different carbohydrate, active enzymes, and then she could sort of match those up with her candidate enzymes.
Jason Boock (02:32):
And so in this way, right, she’s putting for the hypothesis of this might be an enzyme that’s expressed by her fungal cells, right? Maybe she’s discovering a lactase enzyme that has slightly altered specificity or slightly altered activity towards these plastic sort of substrates. So, and that one, I think she’s really advancing the field. She has a goal of trying to do some transcriptomics or some proteomics with this where she actually will go through and sort of reculture her fungus. And then at sort of underlying phenotypic changes we’ve, we’ve tied it a little bit to synthetic biology by saying she could then take these enzymes and make them in sort of maybe a more genetically tractable hosts, maybe E.coli or maybe Saccaromyces cerevisiae, right. To be able to maybe make more of this enzyme to be able to promote degradation. So I think that’s a really exciting project and she drives all of it. I just give her a couple of papers here.
Natalie Kuldell (03:26):
Okay. I don’t know what you were like as a high school student. What you have just described is not what I was like as a high school student and she is remarkable, but your mentorship of that project is absolutely invaluable.
Jason Boock (03:44):
You a sense of what Chris is doing. So Chris is another student who’s has his own BioBuilder project. And he’s looking at sort of how we can use plastic degradation in microbial fuel cells. And so he’s planning to use a bacteria that was isolated from a plastic recycling plant a few years ago, that made huge waves in the scientific community for its ability to degrade pet plastic. And he was looking at sort of just doing a single culture of this organism. But once we started looking into it, it seems like that organism might not be very good at generating electrons. So he’s trying to maybe make a coupled micro or couple community fuel cell where he sort of uses the one bacteria to degrade the plastic into an intermediate that can then be consumed by another bacteria. Who’s very good at making electrons. So in that way, again, with the idea to really implement these. So I think they’ve been, they’ve been very great at doing these experiments and it’s too bad that they haven’t been at the bench this year, but I think we’ve been able to do enough on the computer to at least get them some hypotheses to move forward.
Natalie Kuldell (04:49):
It’s incredible. I mean, I think the resilience of the students both, the changing plan of not being able to do experiments, but rather now focus on things that they can do. And also to pivot the work that they’re doing as they make the discoveries that they’re doing, it’s really so mature and so sophisticated it’s skills that will carry them forward. No doubt as they move into careers in science and engineering. And your, you know, I’ll say it again, these are not high school students. Like I remember my high school community. They’re incredible. And, and, you know, your ability to help them along is so important to take these students that are so excited and so creative and eager to be able to give them next steps and awareness of what is possible and what is not. So maybe you were exactly a high school student exactly like that. I don’t know. Do you want to say where you started, where you got interested in science?
Jason Boock (05:50):
I did start in high school. So I was very lucky to grow up in Pennsylvania and we, this a competition called the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of science. And I got, I started doing projects for that when I was in seventh grade. And these were science fair projects that we would do, and we would pair ourselves up with teachers in school. But then the nice thing was, is we would go to the sort of County level competition. We would give a sort of 10 minute presentation. At that point I think I had transparency slides that were all numbered and I could put them on and sort of go through my presentation. Maybe I’m dating myself a little bit there. But then I was able to do this throughout high school. And then, you know, if we scored well enough on our presentations there, we got to go to Penn state for a long weekend and then present everything together.
Jason Boock (06:39):
So it was a fantastic opportunity to learn how to present science but also perform scientific experiments. And I think I can still remember my first one, we were doing testing of Vitamin C content in juices. And I sort of had a hypothesis that maybe a juice sat out, maybe the Vitamin C content would change. So I think we had some orange juice and some grape juice that we put in sort of the refrigerator, or just let them sit on the counter. And then I had a burette and we were titrating in, I think I, iodine that we bought at the drug store to be able to sort of do these things. I think I measured everything in drops, a really scientific way of doing it.
Natalie Kuldell (07:22):
“The metric drop,” exactly.
Jason Boock (07:25):
I had the right tool to do it. I just don’t think we had the skills to do it. And I think it was because my parents were so supportive of that. And I think they were super helpful in buying those materials. We still have the beer at home. I think they offered to donate it to my research lab, but I’m waiting, I don’t do a whole lot of titrations anymore. But I think that really paved the way for, you know, you know, learning how to present science. I remember the first time that I had gone through and did that presentation, I think I gave it to one of the teachers and they’re like, this, this isn’t, this isn’t how you do this. Here’s, here’s a better way to think about this. So I think that was a real a huge learning process.
Jason Boock (08:02):
And I think I did. I did an experiment putting preservatives in bread and looking at mold growth. I think we tried to kill some termites using some antibiotics for a lab. And I think I finally wrapped up with measuring like friction coefficients for tires on different surfaces. So a huge set of things. Certainly never, nothing is complex is doing BioBuilder design. I think certainly there was a lot less biology that we had opportunities to do, but very exciting projects. And it was just great to see everybody who was doing it. And then, you know, the thrill of discovery was there. And I think that started my pathway into sort of a research,
Natalie Kuldell (08:45):
So I think it’s just astonishing to me how clearly you remember these projects. I think there is such a lasting impact of working on scientific or engineering question. And that it is driven, that it is self-directed and comes from something that as an individual you’re curious about, and you can gather that data
Jason Boock (09:08):
Those aha moments when something works, I think that’s what really drives you forward as you forward on those days when the experiments maybe don’t work as much as you expect them to. But I think putting it all together, it was just a great experience and really, I think provided a, you know, a desire to do that further.
Natalie Kuldell (09:28):
Yup. So then you went from high school to college knowing that you wanted to study science.
Jason Boock (09:33):
Yeah. So I, yeah, so I had done you know, I’d done a lot, a lot of the research as a sort of high school student. I had done a bunch of engineering programs, I think, throughout high school as well, and kind of wanted to marry those two things together, which led to sort of, even the choice of college. I wanted to go to a place where I would have the opportunity to do undergraduate research. Right. So that was probably one of the primary deciding factors of where to go. I don’t know that I necessarily knew exactly what I wanted to do. I think, you know, I was probably, I was probably going to be a mechanical engineer at most universities. But I was also interested in neuroscience at the time and really just, I knew that there was something in there that I wanted to do. And then I remember receiving a flyer in the mail about biomolecular engineering and thinking that that was really fun and interesting. I’d never heard of it before. I knew I liked biology. Right. Knew I liked chemistry. And then the mathematics was great. So I was like, let’s give that a shot. I did that for my undergraduate and never looked back.
Natalie Kuldell (10:34):
So thank goodness for that flyer landing in your mailbox or wherever it was, because I think the awareness of all of these ways of combining the interests that students have, it’s really not obvious students kind of they’re like, well, I kind of like this and I’m kind of good at that, but, you know, I don’t know what that adds up to. So the awareness raising is a very big part of what has to happen if we’re going to bring all the talent along. Did you say where you went to undergraduate?
Jason Boock (10:59):
I went to Johns Hopkins. So in Baltimore so, and I think it was a fortuitous choice because I think they had a lot of faculty who were doing this biomolecular engineering people who were doing tissue culture engineering or cell mechanics engineering. Some other people were studying protein folding. I ended up working with my research advisor was studying allosteric enzymes. And so he had actually created an artificial allosteric enzyme in the laboratory, and I got the sort of opportunity to go through and sort of characterize some of this. We had, we had discovered that it was actually partially inhibited by a metal and we were trying to discover how it was inhibited by that metal. And then next thing, you know, because we had made mutations, we were able to do some different surface science sort of measurements, but that as well.
Jason Boock (11:49):
And yeah, I, I liked it so much. I was there, I think every summer doing research and completed a master’s degree as well. So I think it was one of those things where I got in and got in really deep on it. Spend a lot of time on the project and it kind of led me to understand sort of what’s happening in the field, right. Sort of where my interest level or different interests are. Right. And then, you know, certainly made me very excited to get a PhD. I think I probably went into college knowing that that’s where I wanted to go, but I think I love college knowing that, you know, I wanted to sort of go to that academic level after sort of my PhD.
Natalie Kuldell (12:26):
That’s very cool. It’s not all that often as an undergraduate, that people go so deep into a particular topic area. A lot of times people will touch on a bunch of different research areas, which is all good. Right. So, but when you are in a place and you know, it’s the right thing for you to have that chance to really dig deep into the questions and make some headway, right. Because research does take a long time. It’s not like you’re going to find the answers in just a summer.
Jason Boock (12:55):
And now I get to see it on the other side. Right. So I now get to mentor students in lab and I think I get to see both sides of it. Right. I see students who really do come in with a desire to go deep into a project, right. They really want to make an impact. Right. Understand things at a very deep level. And then I also have students who are, you know, they really want to see what’s out there. Right. And they want to see the different areas, different projects, different ideas, different ways of thinking about research. Right. So that they can make a, you know, maybe a more informed decision down the line as to which one they want. And I think both are really successful strategies. And it just depends on kind of, you know, where you see yourself going.
Natalie Kuldell (13:36):
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m not surprised that you are such a dedicated mentor to your students and that you have the open sort of ideas about what they are there for and what their benefit could be. We share a friend and colleague in your graduate mentor, so do you want to take that next step and go from, from Hopkins into graduate school?
Jason Boock (13:59):
Yeah, so yeah, so I, well, I went to graduate school at Cornell. So I worked with Matt Delisa there and we were doing more protein engineering work. And that’s where I actually learned about cellulite cellulase enzymes, which has helped me sort of transition those to those enzymes that degrade plastic cause they’re actually fairly related to each other. And there we were looking at how can we make bacteria better at doing protein engineering? So we were coming up with clever ways for the bacteria to sort of know if, if a protein was well folded or not, so that we could better screen protein engineering libraries. So that was really exciting, but I also got to use a native secretion pathway. So we got to do a little bit of science there as well. Studying how that secretion pathway actually consents a folded or unfolded protein is really interesting.
Jason Boock (14:50):
We did secretion from cells as well. So we were looking at how can we make proteins secrete which is something that’s, you know, pretty hard to do. And we were coming up with ways of screening those and you know, it was just a, it was a great place in a lot of fun to see a bunch of different projects. Right. And I think it has really allowed me to sort of when, when I’ve started continuing my career, seeing the different places that we can go. And I think, you know, one of the hallmarks that I take from that is, is learning from nature and sort of how we can use natural driven evolution or how we can use nature’s inspired strategies to really enhance what we’re learning about. So if we go back to the fungal system, right, learning from the fungus that can already do what we’re trying to do, I think nature has lots of years on us even as, as biological engineering is taking off. Right. I think we’re still at an infancy there and using those strategies is going to be really powerful.
Natalie Kuldell (15:52):
I appreciate how humble you are. I think sometimes people oversell this field and all that we can do, but I think that the notion that nature has a lot of years on us is spot on because there are so many ways of solving problems and we have just scratched the surface
Jason Boock (16:07):
And I think that makes it fun for me as an, as an academic engineer. Right. So I’m in a chemical engineering department. I can see myself drawn to the engineering problems, right. So the application driven science, but I’m also scientifically motivated. Right. So I want to see those underlying mechanisms and the goal is to find those kinds of design rules so that when we go through and put the engineering design on paper, right. That we can improve upon that even further. Right. And how can we understand these natural systems and what we can do with them? Cause I think, I mean, as we’ve seen from BioBuilder, there’s many sort of problems out there that can be solved by these tools, these synthetic biology circuits cells themselves. Right. So, so how do we understand what’s going on so that we can put forth the best solutions possible?
Natalie Kuldell (16:55):
Yeah. That engineering process that overlays the scientific discovery. I completely agree is how we’re going to take this endeavor forward for sure. So, all right. So from Ithaca where did you head out?
Jason Boock (17:09):
Right. So that’s when I moved to Cambridge and did a postdoc at MIT. And there, we were looking at a different sort of native cysts or natural systems. So we were looking to culture bacteria under high pressures of carbon dioxide. And it turns out biology doesn’t like to exist under high pressures of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide can actually be quite toxic for natural systems, which is potentially a problem that we’re running into as we keep sort of dumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So we isolated bacteria from an underground CO2 reservoir and then my job was to engineer it. So it’s this environmental isolate. And so we were able to make the bacteria fluoresce introducing GFP, but then we’re also able to make it, make some biofuels and other bioproducts and potentially this is a, you know, a strategy for doing some different chemical processing. And you know, it’ll be interesting to see if this bacteria right, can sort of do some other fun biology underneath sort of different pressures of carbon dioxide as we sort of move towards trying to find uses for this. So I think that’s an exciting area that’s going to be potentially very, you know, useful in the upcoming year.
Natalie Kuldell (18:20):
Yeah. I, I think you know, starting with that very important social question about, you know, how do we interact with CO2 and then to find the understanding that youthere are ways to engineer microbes to address things that are relevant in that process it is vital. So how cool is that? Did you like your time in Cambridge?
Jason Boock (18:46):
Oh, I loved it. Oh, it was a great place to be, I think it was fantastic to meet everybody there. I think that’s where I met you Natalie as well as everybody else in BioBuilder. And it’s a great community of scientists, I think, between the different universities and all the pharmaceutical companies, all the startup companies, right. All the synthetic biology companies. Right. I think there’s just so much going on there that it’s just this incubator for a lot of innovation and very powerful. And I think that’s what made it nice for all of the students as well through BioBuilder is because they had that connection to somebody there. And I think it’s, it’s very innovative, especially in this space and I’m excited to see all the different, clever solutions that people come up with.
Natalie Kuldell (19:35):
Agreed. Yeah, it’s, there’s a lot, a lot of cleverness and this, a lot of great innovation and ideas. Your backdrop is beautiful. Where did you land after being at Cambridge
Jason Boock (19:48):
Not Cambridge! So I currently am an assistant professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. And so working in the Department of Chemical, Paper and Biomedical Engineering. So keeping with that theme of chemical engineering throughout the process paper engineering is actually quite interesting, especially from a biotechnology standpoint, right. I think there are some people who are looking at enzymes to sort of do deep cleaning technologies. There’s a potential for cellular basis to play a role in recycling sort of paper and sort of treating paper as well as potentially even just designing better paper using proteins. So I think there’s some, some fun aspects there that I’d never even thought of before coming here. But so Miami being a public liberal arts sort of school we’re focused on undergraduate mentorship and sort of, that was what drew me to this program, right, was the sort of ability to work with students at the bench and really train the sort of students who are going to go to graduate school, or we’re going to get those R and D jobs and really started the sort of beginning of their research career and being able to influence them there.
Jason Boock (20:58):
So I think that’s been a lot of fun for me. It’s certainly one of those things where, you know, I have now my own sort of research projects that are ongoing and we’re, we’re looking at transcription factors. We have some other projects working with industry on different laundry detergents as well as, you know, different biomaterials using elastin light polypeptide. So we have a lot of sort of space that our, our lab has started going into already which is really exciting. And you know, it’s a fun environment to be in we’re very collaborative. So I think that’s, that’s helpful. And you know, certainly the students are getting a fantastic experience. They, you know, I’m looking forward to them getting out and presenting some of this research.
Natalie Kuldell (21:42):
It’s amazing. I had not thought about paper engineering and, and as you say, there is so much, I love that it is a collaborative endeavor with chemical engineering and biomedical engineer. It sounds so smart. And I do think that’s how you’re going to solve these intractable, very difficult problems is by working across boundaries that you wouldn’t normally think you could,
Jason Boock (22:07):
I’ve found that I think the most successful collaborations are the people. If you’re speaking exactly the same language, it’s hard to sort of have a really meaningful collaboration. It’s really when you can bring people who have slightly altered skill sets, right. And sort of put everybody together into that sort of brainstorming session to come out with, you know, how can we really be innovative together? And I think that’s where science is happening right now is that these interfaces, and we’re really sort of starting to break down these sort of desperateness between say even science and engineering, right. I think there’s a huge amount of overlap or where different fields within science or engineering, right. Where we’re collaborating with each other. So I think thinking about this as really, how can you impact things by putting together your own training, I think is, is very powerful.
Natalie Kuldell (22:55):
I wish someone had said that to me when I was back in high school to the notion that you had to choose where you wanted to work, you know, it really runs counter to that idea that having some cross training, having some vocabulary that you can share with people who have different focuses different, but it’s there aren’t walls between these different disciplines. It’s really much more helpful when you can have conversations across them. For sure. Yeah.
Jason Boock (23:23):
And even like, you got to talk to the business people too, so, you know, you have to be able to talk to everybody about things. And I think if there was one thing that I sort of learned through this from high school is how big communication is for this whole process. And I think I was lucky enough to participate in a program called G K-12 grad school, where I got to go to high schools and actually share sort of some laboratories and developed some sort of science for them. But you know, it really put forth this idea that, you know, as a scientist, I thought, you know, you go into the laboratory and right, you, you create a great experiment, you put in a laboratory notebook, but if you’re not great at science, science communication, that’s all the further it ever goes. It never leaves the laboratory notebook.
Jason Boock (24:09):
Right. And really it’s sharing that with your peers right. In, in, in science, but it’s also sharing it with the general community. And how can you sort of bridge those different audiences and make sure that you’re your targeting or your you’re talking about those things to people I think is really important, right? Because that goes back to your underlying motivation for doing the work of benefiting society. Right. And if you can’t talk about it, then it’s really going to be hard to say that that’s a, a useful project or a useful endeavor to go through. So that’s what I would tell people is I ended up spending much more of my time writing and talking than I probably would have ever thought in high school, I thought it was all just this bench work and that, that’s just not what it is. It’s it’s talking to people about the science and what you’re doing
Natalie Kuldell (24:58):
What great advice and how lucky are we to have you in the bio builder community? Because sharing the work that we do is, is, you know, just wrapped up in it, right? We, we do a lot of team-based things. We do a lot of communication and celebration of the work. So boy, are we lucky to have you in it? And those students are going to do great things with your mentorship, congratulations on all the success. I’m so excited to hear about it.
Jason Boock (25:23):
Well, I mean that’s been so fun to be part of the community for the past three years and just get to meet all of the different students as well as everybody associated with bio builder. And the excitement that they bring is fantastic to all of these.