Betül Kaçar

We engineer bacteria.

So ideally, we want to work with bacteria that we can engineer.

Seldom we develop the tools to engineer them.

And it depends on the question that we are interested in.

If we are interested in connecting the biology and geology to understand the early life and fundamental innovations across billions of years...

there are really good candidates like cyanobacteria.

So we use cyanobacteria very frequently in the lab.

We can engineer its genome.

We can perturb its function by poking its own DNA with the foreign DNA that we engineer in the lab.

We work with E. coli.

It's the most simple in terms of model systems goes.

Organism that one can study, well-established, sort of a pet, lab pet, that we use it a lot for cloning and for understanding basic functions of the cell, given that it's really well-studied.

We inject pretty much all the bacteria that we work with, with foreign DNA.

We also work with diazotrophs.

These are azotobacteria.

They're one of the prime nitrogen fixers, nitrogen fixing bacteria.

So nitrogen is a triple bond gas that's pretty abundant in the atmosphere.

But nitrogen itself cannot be directly utilized by cells given it is triple bond.

It needs to be converted to ammonia that is then used for the downstream cellular functions.

Yes, so nitrogen needs to be fixed before our cells can make use of it.