MIT Scientist Kristala Jones Prather Finds Breakthroughs in Bioengineering
Profile: Kristala Jones Prather
For RRTN by Dan Sheridan
It’s a long way from high school in Longview, Texas, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in more ways than distance. But Associate Professor Kristala Jones Prather not only made the leap but is thriving in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering. She now lives in Milton, Massachusetts, with her husband, MIT grad Darcy Prather, and their two young daughters.
Dr. Jones Prather and her MIT researchers are harnessing the synthetic power of biology to build microbial chemical factories. Her research falls into two categories: retrobiosynthesis for production of organic compounds, and understanding and optimizing gene dosage effects in metabolic engineering. Retrobiosynthesis is a reverse engineering of sorts, building compounds with natural and engineered enzymes strung together in different combinations in microbial hosts like E. coli.
Dr. Prather Jones, known to people with whom she works as Kris, was named a Technology Review Young Innovator in 2007, the same year as Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg. She won the Department of Chemical Engineering’s Outstanding Faculty Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 2006 and took the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award in 2004. She is also an investigator for the multi-institutional Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
“MIT wasn’t one of those places people from my [high] school went,” she said in an interview. “The guidance counselors told you if you were academically very talented, you should go to UT, Austin, and be in the honors program there.”
A trusted teacher, knowing of her math skills, suggested that she consider chemical engineering.
“She said ‘And if you’re going to be an engineer, you should go to MIT.’ I said, ‘great; what is MIT?’ I had never heard of it.”
But the advice of that teacher, of a family friend, and her own research, put her on a path to Cambridge.
She was an MIT undergraduate, class of 1994. After her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, she spent four years in the BioProcess Research and Development department at the Merck Research Labs in New Jersey, working on how to produce drugs using biological processes instead of chemical reactions. She joined the MIT faculty in 2004.
She was the recipient of an MIT seed grant for energy research in 2008, investigating the microbial synthesis of pentanol as a biofuel. Dr. Jones Prather and colleagues have recently used protein engineering, where researchers utilize bacteria to make new products or produce more naturally occurring compounds.
Mixing protein engineering with traditional metabolic engineering, they caused E. coli to synthesize a secreted plant chemical 2,600 times faster than normal and about four times faster than if they were using only traditional metabolic engineering. Dr. Jones Prather has said this could be used in other synthetic pathways inside cells, including in producing biofuels or drugs.
Energy challenges
“We have an energy problem globally,” Dr. Jones Prather said in an interview. “Petroleum reserves, in terms of easily accessible petroleum reserves, are finite. And the discoveries of new reserves are going to happen at a slower rate than our consumption, so we’ve got to try to figure out a number of different alternatives to bring that back into some sort of energetic balance.”
What’s most promising?
” I don’t think there is one thing,” she said. “Part of the issue is that we live in a world where liquid transportation fuels dominate. So given that reality, then we’ve got to come up with afterlives that will work with the existing infrastructure and then use that, almost as a placeholder, to allow other technologies to develop.
“So when we talk about [how] everything is going to be plugged into the grid, then that means we have to do something about increasing the amount of electrical power available in this country. And it takes time to do that. So all the solutions we’re talking about for energy and access to renewable energy are about how long it takes you to get there. And also how expensive is it going to be.
I think biofuel is one of the solutions. I certainly don’t think it is the answer. I don’t think that’s going to solve all of our problems. We can also easily run into a situation where the rate at which we consume biomass is greater than the rate at which we can produce it, which is happening with petroleum. But it’s something in the short term that is more rapidly brought on line than some of the other alternatives. And in the end it will be a combination of many things,” she said.
“There will be achievements in solar technology. There will be achievements in battery technology. And I think you have to have some wind in there as well, because it’s a big problem with a lot of people on the planet and all of us need energy.”
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