Lab news

10/2021 More papers accepted

Amanda's review article and Gavin's last paper were accepted! Definitely worth a celebration.

8/2021 Andrew's endgame piece was accepted.

This collaborative work explores synthetic coculture strategies for carbon-conserved bioproduction by directly recycling CO2 emitted from biofuel production. We tracked how CO2 was exchanged within synthetic cocultures and unexpected carbon exchanges were revealed. In my biased opinion, this work is pioneering and unique. It has integrated distinct expertise of Profs. Nielsen's, Varman's and mine. We are proud of this Andrew's endgame piece. A brilliant job, Andrew!

04/2021 Updates from our lab

It has been a challenging year! However, our lab members are still making strong progresses through all difficulties.

Andrew defended his PhD dissertation 4/16/2021 and joined DuPont as a scientist. Congrats, Dr. Flores! We are proud of you and you have our best wishes for your future pursuits.

05/2020 Some news from our lab

Rodrigo won 'The Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS)' award, which is given to academically outstanding doctoral students (https://phoenix.arcsfoundation.org/scholars/current-scholars-2). Moses was also awarded with the fellowship from CLAS.

Andrew's second coculture paper is published as well as Moses' first book chapter. I believe they will open a door to our coming new discoveries. Look forward to an exciting journey.

Our undergraduate researchers, Rebecca and Ryan, finished their study at ASU and will move on to their PhD graduate careers (Tufts and OSU, respectively). You have my best wishes!

Lastly, Xuan got promoted to associate professor with tenure (行到水穷处，坐看云起时). This ~1300 years old Chinese poem precisely describes how I feel.

12/2019 NSF CAREER award.

How are charged renewable chemicals exported into extracellular environments?

We have always been intrigued by this question, especially considering very high extracellular concentrations of the final fermentation products (sometimes > 1M). With the support of this award ( NSF CAREER: Systems-Level Identification and Characterization of Cellular Export and Efflux Systems for Renewable Chemicals), we will try to gain some insights about this process and develop efficient export/efflux systems for renewable chemicals.

10/2019 Three more papers got accepted recently.

  1. Kurgan, G., Kurgan, L., Schneider, A., Onyeabor, M., Rodriguez-Sanchez, Y., Taylor, E., Carbonell, P., Martinez, R., Shi, X., Gu, H. and Wang, X. (2019) Identification of major malate export systems in an engineered malate producing Escherichia coli aided by substrate similarity search. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol. Accepted.

We found that DcuA, CitT, and TtdT consitute the major malate export system in E. coli using a cheminformatics-guided genetic approach.


  1. Martinez, R., Flores, A., Dufault, M., Wang, X. (2019) The XylR variant (R121C and P363S) releases arabinose‐induced catabolite repression on xylose fermentation and enhances coutilization of lignocellulosic sugar mixtures. Biotechnol Bioeng. DOI:10.1002/bit.27144

We discovered that chromosomal integration of xylR* (R121C and P363S) releases L-arabinose-induced repression and enhances co-fermentation of lignocellulosic sugar mixtures. As shown in the figure, the xylR* integration enabled ethanologenic E. coli LY180 to achieve a full coutilization of 120 g/L glucose-xylose-arabinose sugar mixtures.


  1. Kurgan, G., Sievert, C., Flores, A., Schneider, A., Billings, T., Panyon, L., Morris, C., Taylor, E., Kurgan, L., Cartwright, R., Wang, X. (2019) Parallel experimental evolution reveals a novel repressive control of GalP on xylose fermentation in Escherichia coli. Biotechnol Bioeng. DOI:10.1002/bit.27004

We discovered that a commonly used substitute glucose transporter, GalP, represses the catabolism of secondary sugars, such as xylose, in E. coli by transcriptionally downregulating the relevant catabolic genes.

09/2019 Our lab has moved to Biodesign C building

Look forward to exciting science coming from our new lab!

04/2019 Andrew's papers get accepted.

Flores, A., Zeynep, A., Nielsen, D., Wang, X. (2019) Engineering a synthetic, orthogonal co-culture system for enhanced conversion of lignocellulose-derived sugars to ethanol. ACS Synth Biol. DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.9b00007 A

Reported in this work, Andrew has engineered a series of synthetic, catabolically-orthogonal co-culture systems and developed a tuning strategy to easily balance the catabolic activities in the synthetic communities.

Flores, A., Wang, X., Nielsen, D. (2019) Recent trends in integrated bioprocesses: aiding and expanding microbial biofuel/biochemical Production. Curr Opin Biotechnol. 57, 82-87.

In addition, Andrew has a review article also recently published and it made to the cover of the journal.

01/2019 Gavin's papers get accepted.

  1. Kurgan, G., Panyon, L., Rodriguez-Sanchez, Y., Pacheco, E., Nieves, L. M., Mann, R., Nielsen, D., Wang, X. (2019). Bioprospecting of native efflux pumps to enhance furfural tolerance in ethanologenic Escherichia coli. Appl Environ Microbiol. Accepted.

In this work, we screened a comprehensive plasmid library encoding native multidrug resistance (MDR) efflux pumps, porins and select exporters from Escherichia coli for furfural tolerance and discovered that small multidrug resistance (SMR) pumps, such as SugE and MdtJI, conferred furfural tolerance. These pumps have putative furfural efflux activities and provide a platform to further enhance furfural tolerance by protein engineering.

In addition, we have a review article recently published.

  1. Machas, M., Kurgan, G., Flores, A., Schneider, A., Jha, A., Coyle, S., Varman, A., Wang, X., and Nielsen, D. (2018). Emerging tools, enabling technologies, and future opportunities for the bioproduction of aromatic chemicals. Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology. doi:10.1002/jctb.5762

01/2019 A couple new projects initiated.

In coming years, we will participate in the new DOE project (Enhancing carbon fixation in cyanobacteria). Our group also started a small project searching for useful microbial transporters with some support from industry. Both projects are challenging and bring new research directions into our group. Time will tell us what we will discover on the way.

07/2018 Gavin won his PhD degree and started working in industry.

After four years very intense research, Gavin finished his scientific journey as a PhD student and now becomes Dr. Kurgan. Although Xuan wants to keep Gavin working at his lab forever, IDT made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Dr. Kurgan, please keep up excellent efforts and we hope great things coming from your new adventures!

07/2017 Gavin, Andrew and Xuan went to 2017 SIMB @ Denver.

In 2017 Annual Meeting of Society for Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology (SIMB), Gavin and Andrew gave successful poster presentations and Xuan gave a talk about our new discovery about xylR mutations. It was wonderful to see our old colleagues and friends. Gavin won the best poster presentation in Metabolic Engineering, which was an intense competition with 16 other posters. Good Job!

06/2017 Chris' paper gets accepted in PNAS.

Sievert, C., Nieves, L. M., Panyon, L. A., Loeffler, T., Morris, C., Cartwright, R., Wang, X. (2017) Experimental evolution reveals a novel avenue to release catabolite repression via mutations in XylR. PNAS. In press.

In this work, we provide an effective, simple and universal genetic method to enhance sugar co-utilization in E. coli.

05/2017 Some news from our lab members

We went to ASM regional meeting in April and Gavin won an award for his poster presentation.In addition, our undergraduate researchers, Eric Taylor, Robert Mann and Aidan Schneider won SOLUR support for the coming semesters. Congratulations!


Junpei Xiao and Nathan Palmer already started their graduate life last year. Logan Kurgan and Zeynep Ayla will also move on for their PhD careers. Best luck to their new adventures.

09/2016 A new collaborative project funded by DOE

We will collaborate with Vermaas and Nielsen teams at ASU to engineer cyanobacteria to produce biodiesel molecules.

05/2016 Some news from our lab members

Gavin won the best grad/postdoc poster presentation in ASM AZ/NV 2016 annual meeting. He also was given the SAGE award for his research plan recently. In addition, he passed his comprehensive test and became a PhD candidate. This summer Logan was awarded multiple scholarships/fellowships including IMSD, USE and other foundation scholarships. Aidan was awarded a SOLUR scholarship. Congratulations to all of them!

Logan seems especially happy because of some unclear suspicious reasons.

06/2015 Some positive news about funding.

Our collaborative research with Dr. Nielsen in Chemical Engineering at ASU got funded by NSF. We aim to improve aromatic compound production in E. coli to a new level.

05/2015 Farewell to Taylor and Chandler.

Taylor and Chandler graduated from ASU. Best luck to our excellent undergrad researchers.

02/2015 Lizy and Larry's review article gets accepted.

Nieves, L.M., Panyon, L.A., Wang, X. (2015) Engineering Sugar Utilization and Microbial Tolerance toward Lignocellulose Conversion. Front Bioeng Biotechnol. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2015.00017.

First paper generated in this lab.