Researchers
Post-doctoral Fellow
Natalia works under the supervision of Alexander Yakunin in the Enzyme Group at Structural Proteomics in Toronto. Her research is focused on biochemical and structural studies of nucleases.
Technician
In addition to general lab management, Greg also work on cloning, mutagenesis, enzyme screening and characterization. He is a member of Alexander Yakunin's research group at Structural Proteomics in Toronto.
Technician
Hong is part of Alexei Savchenko's research group at Structural Proteomics in Toronto. She has particular expertise in protein purification and crystallization.
Senior Manager, SiREM
Phil has over 20 years of research laboratory and managerial experience pertaining to molecular biology, microbiology and environmental remediation. He is Senior Manager at SiREM, a leader in bioremediation implementation and testing, and currently focuses on research and development, marketing initiatives and technical management of genetic testing services.
PhD Student
Cheryl is part of Elizabeth Edwards' research group and is using molecular, metagenomic and proteomic techniques to investigate the microbes and key metabolic enzymes involved in benzene biodegradation in a methanogenic culture.
Technician
Rosa's main responsibilities are to perform high-throughput cloning and test-expression for selected targets in a pET system using E. coli. She works under the supervision of Alexei Savchenko.
Senior Manager
Sandra is a Senior Manager at BEEM partner SiREM. She has over 16 years of professional experience specializing in remediation treatability studies and bioaugmentation culture development and production.
Technician
Olga is part of Alexei Savchenko's research group and specializes in the purification and crystallization of target proteins, as well as enzymatic activity assays.
Technician
Elena is part of Alexei Savchenko's structural proteomics group and focuses on the expression, purification and crystallization of proteins for the determination of their 3-D structure by x-ray crystallography. Her targets of interest include potential industrial enzymes, effector proteins of pathogenic bacteria and proteins responsible for antiobiotic resistance.
Technician
Robert is part of the team at Structural Proteomics in Toronto where he works primarily on the CRISPR project with a focus on enzymatic characterization as well as protein purification.
Ph.D. Student
Nigel brings a wealth of experience in the commercial deployment of environmental technology to BioZone, especially in the area of waste management. He has joined Elizabeth Edwards' research group to work on the optimization of a novel two-stage process for the anaerobic digestion of organic waste from residential, commercial and industrial sources. The principal objectives are to accelerate the reaction rate, maximize biogas production, assess performance with different feedstocks, stabilize by-products and increase versatility.
PhD Student
Mahbod's research focuses on enzymatic degradation of bio-plastics including Poly Lactic Acid, Poly Hydroxybutyrate and their co-polymers. Bio-plastics from renewable sources are green alternatives to current petroleum-derived plastics. Under the supervision of Elizabeth Edwards and Alexander Yakunin, Mahbod performs functional screening of different metagenomic libraries as well as several purified proteins to identify new enzymes capable of depolymerizing bio-plastics. Heterologous expression, molecular and biochemical characterization as well as enzyme-polymer interactions, degradation intermediates and, finally, recycling processes are also part of his research.
Bioinformatician
Cleo's work focuses on the metabolic reconstruction and modeling of microbial communities. She uses metagenomic sequences to build computational models and performs simulations to analyze the metabolic potentials of the microorganisms of interest. Cleo works under the supervision of Krishna Mahadevan and Elizabeth Edwards.
PhD Student
Ahsan's research focuses on understanding the community interactions of a dechlorinating bacterial community using the tools of bioinformatics and systems biology in order to enhance its bioremedication capability. He works under the supervision of Krishna Mahadevan.
Technician
Marina is part of Alexei Savchenko's research group and specializes in the purification and crystallization of bacterial proteins, a crucial step in the process of resolving protein structures using x-ray diffraction. Her work focuses mainly on determining the structure of proteins of important bacterial pathogens to facilitate development of new antibacterial drugs.
Master's Student
Working under the supervision of Brad Saville, Alan is performing life cycle analysis on various production pathways of biobutanol with the use of Aspen modelling to determine their impact on the environment.
Laboratory Technician
In addition to managing daily lab activities, Line conducts remediation treatability testing using bioremediation technologies such as biostimulation and bioaugmentation. Her experiments use chemical reduction as a remediation technology.
PhD Student
Fei is part of the Edwards research group and is investigating anaerobic benzene biodegradation, including mechanisms of degradation and the properties of the involved microbial consortium.
PhD Student
Working under the supervision of Elizabeth Edwards, Sarah is investigating the microbial community in benzene-degrading enrichment cultures under different conditions, including nitratrate-reducing conditions. She is using molecular and microscopy techniques to investigate the physical relationships of the involved bacteria, and hopes to gain new insights into the process of benzene degradation that will help increase the rate at which it occurs.
Research Associate
Torsten is part of Elizabeth Edwards' research group and is working in the area of anaerobic digestion and lignocellulosic biomass biotransformation.
PhD Student
Olivia is characterizing reductive dehalogenase enzymes from mixed microbial cultures used for bioremediation. Her research is focused on substrate characterization using Blue-native PAGE and protein purification for structural characterization. She works under the supervision of Elizabeth Edwards.
Technician
Olena specializes in protein purification and crystallization for the determination of protein structures. This complex process depends greatly on the purity of proteins obtained, and Olena focuses on optimizing protein purification using Ni-affinity chromatography and fast protein liquid chromatography. She is part of Alexei Savchenko's research team.
Technician
Ana's work focuses on optimizing and carrying out screens on metagenomic libraries to identify novel enzyme activities for environmental and industrial applications.
Post-doctoral Fellow
Mohammad brings expertise in biofuels and bioproducts from agricultural waste and softwood to the BEEM project. Working under the supervision of Heather MacLean and Bradley Saville, his work focuses on life cycle analysis of biofuels.
Ph.D. Student
Luz is part of Elizabeth Edwards' bioremediation research group and is investigating some of the challenges and inhibitions faced by dechlorinating microbial communities such as KB-1 at field sites. These include low pH conditions, the presence of co-contaminants, and the addition of zero-valent iron, which is also intended to promote dehalogentation of VOCs in groundwater, along with emulsifying agents.
Research Associate
Alexander's researech focus is determining the structure and function of type III effectors of gram negative bacteria. In particular, he is interested in the structure and function of effectors from phytopathogens. Type III effectors often target host proteins and by studying them, proteins and pathways involved in disease resistance and other stress responses in plants can be elucidated. These plant processes are more poorly understood than their animal (mammalian) counterparts.
Mass Spectrometry Facility Manager
Andrei provides technical support and expertise for the application of mass spectrometry to a wide range of biological and inorganic analyses, including high resolution protein identification and small molecules characterization. He has developed experimental methods for chromatographic separation of protein complexes and for organic low molecular structural determination. Andrei is responsible for training students and researchers on the use of LC and GC-MS techniques in chemistry and biology. He operates the Biozone mass spec facility on an open access basis and also supplies services to researchers not affiliated with University of Toronto.
Post-doctoral Fellow
Peter's research involves structural characterization, primarily through x-ray crystallography, of enzymes to understand the biochemical basis of their activity.
PhD Student
Shuiquan's work focuses on mixed microbial cultures that are able to dechlorinate 1,1,1-trichloroethane and chloroform and, therefore, have the potential to be used for bioremediation of field sites contaminated with these two compounds. To understand the underlying biology of these cultures as it relates to dechlorination he uses pyrotag sequencing (for metagenome sequencing), shake cultures (for anaerobic microorganism isolation), native PAGE (for enzyme separation) and column chromatography (for enzyme purification).
Technician
Anatoli's area of expertise is the biochemical characterization of new enzymes. As a technician in Alexander Yakunin's lab, he works on the screening of metagenome libraries for new enzymes, fosmids and ZAP clones.
Undergraduate thesis student
Sergei is completing his undergraduate research under the supervision of Emma Master. He is working on the assessment of non-productive associations between enzymes and plant cell wall polymers. He will develop methods using a quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring to measure non-catalytic interactions between lignin and purified xylanases.
Post-doctoral Fellow
Working under the supervision of Emma Master, Thu is investigating oxidase for fiber polymer modification.
Research Associate
Weijun is part of Emma Master's research group and specializes in metagenomic and metatranscritomic characterization of enrichment cultures. He has expertise in enzyme gene discovery and enzyme overexpression and characterization.
PhD Student
Dennis' research focuses on microbial ecology and evolution, in particular phylogenomics of metagenomes, protein clustering, and metabolic network analysis. He works under the supervision of Robert Beiko.
PhD Student
Mabel's work focuses on the discovery of lignocellulose active enzymes through metagenomic analysis of moose and beaver digestive systems. Working under the supervision of Emma Master, she is using various omics techniques to identify new enzyme activities relevant to lignocellulose processing in anaerobic enrichments. Metagenome and metatranscriptome sequences are used to identify enzyme candidates for recombinant expression and biochemical characterization.
Technician
Xiaohui is a member of Alexei Savchenko's proteomics group at Structural Proteomics in Toronto and specializes in protein expression, purification and crystallization.
PhD Student
Ivy studies the cause of degranulation in the anaerobic treatment of pulp mill effluents by investigating the correlation between the microbial and physical properties of granule and wastewater characteristics.
Technician
Veronica is part of Alexei Savchenko's research group and works on high throughput cloning and test protein expression. Her main dutires are to perform high throughput cloning of effectors in recombinant expression vectors to test for expression and solubility.
