Natalie Kuldell (00:02):
Hello, Kevin.
Kevin Solomon (00:04):
Hi. How are you Natalie?
Natalie Kuldell (00:07):
It’s wonderful to see you. We have been friends for a long time, and I’m so glad to get a chance to chat with you. Would you mind just introducing yourself and where you’re at and we’ll go from there.
Kevin Solomon (00:18):
Hi, my name is Kevin Solomon. I’m an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the university of Delaware,
Natalie Kuldell (00:25):
University of Delaware. What a great, great place. And wow. That’s quite a department. So seems like it does a lot of things. What, what does your lab do?
Kevin Solomon (00:35):
So my, my lab is very much interested in domesticating environmental microorganisms. So to kind of put that in context, we’re interested in addressing challenges and sustainability. So trying to think about how we can turn renewable plant material into biofuels, as well as how do we address this growing problem of plastic waste and what, what I’ve realized over my career is that while synthetic biology offers a lot of potential to engineer microorganism, some things are a little bit more challenging. So to, to use an analogy while we can, we can rebuild our cars, you wouldn’t turn like a, you wouldn’t turn a Honda civic into a race car. I mean, at that point it’s a brand new car <laugh> and so what we try to do is we try to find race car, like things in, in the environment, and then we use synthetic biology to tweak it, to make it more amenable to societal applications.
Natalie Kuldell (01:42):
That’s so great. So it’s like finding a nearest neighbor for what you’re trying to get to. And I will just add that my son would love it. If we could turn a Honda into an F1 car, just saying.
Kevin Solomon (01:53):
People, people do try and they spend a lot of time on a lot of money doing it, but you could buy a Formula 1 car that, I mean, granted it’s a little bit more expensive, but like you said, it’s a lot more efficient
Natalie Kuldell (02:06):
<Laugh> yes, yes. Certainly the shorter distance to your end point would be to start with an F1 car or something close to an F1 car to get there. So, so that’s very cool. So tell me who’s in your lab and, and maybe is there something that you’re super excited about that they’re working on right now?
Kevin Solomon (02:24):
Yeah, so one of my senior grads and a new student in my lab, this is a new collaboration with another professor at the University of Delaware where we’re studying how mealworms, how they’re able to degrade plastics. And so you might ask a question, why do mealworms even degrade plastics? Right? So mealworms are insects. And essentially they, they eat leaves on a lot. If you look at leaves very carefully, they have, they’re very waxy, right? And so those, those waxes that keep the leaf waterproof and prevents the plant from losing too much water, those waxes very much look like the plastics you might find in your styrofoam containers or your water bottles. And those are the same kind of plastics that we don’t really have a good mechanism of recycling them. And so this new rotation student in a very short period of time, his name is Ross Clouder. He has isolated a very vast repertoire of different microbial communities, different microorganisms that are able to degrade different plastics. And now we’re even beginning to pull down specific enzymes that we hope will lead to efficient strategies to break these materials down.
Natalie Kuldell (03:38):
That is amazing. I will never look at a leaf again, without thinking that it’s got this water, this, you know, waxy waterproof coating, you know, like a RainX or something.
Kevin Solomon (03:49):
That, that is exactly what it is. It’s RainX for plants,
Natalie Kuldell (03:52):
That’s so cool. So just to get a little bit nerdy about it, and then <laugh> is it a microbe in the belly of the mealworm, or is it the mealworm itself that has those enzymes?
Kevin Solomon (04:03):
So it’s, it’s a collection or microbial community of microbes that live in the belly of the mealworm that do most of the work. And so when we started off this project, we had these, these mealworms, and we could see them eating the plastic, like the plastics slowly grow over time. But then one of the key questions that we had was, well, is it kind of like corn? You know, you eat corn, but if you kind of if when you go to the bathroom, you can kind of see little corn seeds. But in fact, that is not what happens. The, the plastics that come back out are very different. They’re chemically modified. And since then we have extracted the gut content. So we’ve essentially collected all the microbes that grow in the gut. And we can actually grow them in isolation and they continue to degrade these materials. And so now we are using the tools of systems biology. So we’re essentially looking the genomes. And transcriptomes so looking at the genetic potential of these organisms, to try to understand what exactly is causing you things to, to, to degrade.
Natalie Kuldell (05:08):
That’s amazing. It is sounds so truly interdisciplinary, which you know, you hear a lot as, as relevant and important for solving these complex systems, but between the systems biology and the microbial ecology, and then the entomology and everything else, so what were you trained in that led you to be able to do all this?
Kevin Solomon (05:30):
So during my, during my PhD I was working with E coli, like most synthetic biologists do, and I was really excited about the potential to kind of reprogram organism to do things. And there’s lots of things that we can do, but what I realized towards the end of my PhD is that some phenotypes are very complex. So synthetic biology is very good at putting in one or two genes. You can make it a little bit more sophisticated, but relatively speaking, compared to natural systems, those systems are kind of simple. A lot of these more challenging things require hundreds of enzymes. They have to be coordinated in a specific way, and trying to recreate that is nontrivial. And so I realized that a lot of what we, as, as they say, like in Jurassic Park “Life finds a way.”
Kevin Solomon (06:24):
And so a lot of the things that you want, we wanted to do existed or existed somewhere, the challenge was that they existed in an, in an exotic environment. So in a deep sea vent or in the stomach of some exotic animal that we hadn’t looked at before, and the challenge was then how do we find it? And then how do we make that technology accessible? Because we are not gonna grow them in the guts of worms, or we’re not gonna grow them at high pressures in like you might find in a volcano. So how do we then take these systems that work very well, but then do it in a, in a context that allows us to scale them using traditional biotechnology. And that’s where the synthetic biology comes in, where we can make small tweaks rather than the, the hundreds of changes needed to recreate these complex behaviors.
Natalie Kuldell (07:10):
That is so smart. It’s so very clever. That’s awesome. So quick shout out to where you did your PhD.
Kevin Solomon (07:21):
Yeah, so yeah, I did my PhD at MIT, and I was there when a lot of the seminal people in synthetic biology where. So Drew Endy, and the founders of Ginkgo, such as Reshma Shetty, et cetera. They were all there. It was a strong community, and we were kind of discussing how to engineer microbes, whether we should, and there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm, which I kind of guess swept me up. And so I remember when a lot of next generation DNA assembly techniques, like the Gibson method came online, which I think is really powerful for making these large libraries of constructs. It was the early days of CRISPR and we didn’t really know what CRISPR was, but there, there was a lot of cool activity happening.
Kevin Solomon (08:07):
And now I guess my part from trying to understand these new systems, what I did in my postdoc. So after, after my time at MIT, I went to University of California at Santa Barbara, where I learned about systems biology, so learned about genomics and transcriptomics and how to sequence organisms, and now, and now I’m trying to marry the two. So how, how do we identify novel systems? And then how do we apply the technologies of synthetic biology to them? The thing that I guess people find surprising is that that is also non-trivial. So a lot of things that we’ve developed, they work well in E coli. They work well in Sacchromyces, but part of the reason why there’s exotic microorganisms that we don’t study normally is because a lot of these tools don’t work well in them. And so there is a lot of R and D that has to go into that as well.
Natalie Kuldell (09:05):
Yes, I think tool building for biology is something that had been sort of under-celebrated. But also having been at MIT in that era when we were all getting swept up in the possibility of building really powerful tools to engineer biology there is a lot, I’d say more focus on it and great to have talented people like you doing that marriage of those efforts. Did you always think you would be an engineer like this?
Kevin Solomon (09:37):
So this kind of engineer, certainly not. And I mean when I was a high school student and when I was, when I was entering college, I certainly loved science and math, and I knew I wanted to solve problems, but it wasn’t until I had entered college that I even recognized that we could use biology to solve these kinds of problems. And so in one of my first experiences I was working with a type of yeast people do a variety of things with it and to be quite honest, and it was so long ago, I barely remember what it was. And I also, I was new to the field. So forgive me for my ignorance, but just that’s the fact that the project that I remember had me introducing a new promoter that allowed control of the expression of some protein or another, that I think might have been like a byproduct, like might have been like a protein drug or something like that.
Kevin Solomon (10:34):
But just the ability that we could go in, manipulate the DNA and have the cell do something new, I thought was really compelling. And then again as I learned more about it, the fact that not only could you use it to make things that are traditionally biologic, so like making proteins, like such as insulin or other medicines, but we could begin to think about how do we engineer organisms that could grow into clothing that could form new materials. There are a wealth of applications of biology beyond the conventional squishy things that we think about with biology and I found that really, really fascinating. And so, which is kind of why we’re, we’re trying to address these very hard problems of sustainability. Yes. We get rid of plastics. That’s not something I would’ve thought biology could address 20 years ago.
Natalie Kuldell (11:26):
Right. Right. I mean, I, I think as you say, biology has had a lot of time to solve these challenges that are a lot like the challenges we face and we could learn a lot from what biology has learned to do already. So that’s, that’s pretty cool. So you always were a sciencey mathy, kind of a person. Did you have a family that was encouraging you to pursue this or teachers who would per encourage you to pursue this?
Kevin Solomon (11:54):
So my family was supportive, but they’re not scientists. And so it was really though the possibilities I think, came from really good teachers and mentors. And so I remember after I had kind of gone through this experience and realized that science, that biology was really cool. One of my mentors, he convinced me to apply to graduate school and I grew up in Canada. And so when he, when he encouraged me to go to graduate school, I thought like, oh, I’ll go to University of Toronto, or I’ll go to McGill. I mean, they’re great places, but they’re not MIT. They’re not Stanford, but he’s just like, no, you will work with the best people ever. Here’s a list of places that you must apply for <laugh> after I was done laughing, I just decided to take the leap and, and do it. And I don’t regret that decision. I mean at the time it seemed very overwhelming and very challenging, but I grew into that position. I mean, I think as humans, we thrive best when we’re pushed, when we’re stretched and, and to do that, you have to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
Natalie Kuldell (13:06):
Yes, it is. It is so important to dream big, but it is also so discomforting. Right. <laugh> you feel like the sands are shifting under you, so how wonderful you had a mentor who encouraged you to dream really big and to push you in that direction. That’s so important. I know that you spend a lot of time and care, a great deal about mentorship and, you know, turning around and helping the next in line. You’ve done that with teaching that we did together, through MIT. And you’ve done that since, since you’ve left. Do you wanna say a little bit about how you open your lab up to, to local students?
Kevin Solomon (13:45):
Yes. So, just to kind of go back to that, that example with that mentor who kind of opened his lab to me and kind of showed me what biology could do. I’ve been, I’ve been very passionate about and a very strong advocate for student research. And so I, I am very willing to accept any and all students that show the right level of motivation. And so early in my career. So, I mean in the last I wanna say in the last seven years or so, I, I probably mentored about 80 students both directly in my lab or as part of the program. And I would say that early in my students, or early in my career, one of my most rewarding examples is a student who was probably not, who was definitely not an A+ student.
Kevin Solomon (14:35):
He was a solid B, B- student, but he seemed to be curious about this. And so I let him into my lab. And through that experience, he found that, Hey, I really like biochemistry. I really like doing this genetic engineering. And he picked those electives. And certainly those classes were all A’s and A+’s. And he like raised his GPA. He’s now going to graduate school. He’s now a graduate student. And I think just the ability to kind of spark that fire has been really rewarding. And, and so I’ve, I mean, right now this summer, I have five undergraduate students. I have two high school students and, and I mean I really like to pay forward and, and kind of share that same spark that someone was kind enough to share with me when I, when I was their age.
Natalie Kuldell (15:23):
Well, it is so incredibly important. And obviously something I deeply am committed to as well. So thank you for doing what you do. It makes such a difference. It just changes the future. It really does. And in such a positive way that that will amplify and have all kinds of ripples. So I just, I am so excited to see what you and your students will innovate and do from here on out.
Kevin Solomon (15:54):
Thank you.
Natalie Kuldell (15:55):
Yeah. Thank you for talking with us.