*ENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY IN THE LAB – NANOSENSORS TO MONITOR CAPILLARY-BASED SYSTEMS

Kevin Cash

kcash@mines.edu

Microbial communities are all around us. They’re present in soil, your body and every local pond—breaking down and recycling nutrients. The interdependence of these communities has been known for over a century, with the waste from one microbe providing nutrients to another. Our goal in this research is to develop our nanosensing tools to adequately measure interrelated metabolism in a spatially and temporally defined manner. To do this, we are making sensors that are small enough to fit in the spaces between the bacteria to report concentration changes in some of the key metabolites in these settings – oxygen, lactate, iron and sulfate. We are also developing smaller capillary-based model systems to better mimic the real-world settings seen in the environment while remaining suitable for use in the lab.

Grand Challenge: Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

For some information please see: 1. My website: https://cashlab.org 2. Publication from my group on using our NS to study bacterial dynamics. Jewell MP, Galyean AA, Kirk Harris J, Zemanick ET, Cash KJ. 2019. Luminescent nanosensors for ratiometric monitoring of three-dimensional oxygen gradients in laboratory and clinical Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms. Appl Environ Microbiol 85:e01116-19. https://aem.asm.org/content/85/20/e01116-19/article-info

For now: kcash@mines.edu; after joining group PhD student TBD.