John Dueber

Assistant Professor, Bioengineering Core Member, UCB/UCSF Graduate Group in Bioengineering 327 Stanley Hall mailcode: 1762 510-664-4200 fax: 510-664-4200 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Membership effective July 2009

Research Interests

We employ protein engineering and synthetic biology approaches to gain designable control over biological systems.  We are particularly interested in bioenergy applications with the desire to develop strategies that can also be generalized to other applications.

Research Summary

In one recent project, we built synthetic scaffolds from modular protein-protein interaction domains (used commonly in eukaryotic protein signaling) for the purpose of co-localizing metabolic enzymes in a designable manner.  Furthermore, we took advantage of this modular design to optimize the relative stoichiometry of the enzymes co-targeted to the scaffolded complex.  In this manner, the efficiency of the pathway was considerably (77-fold) improved and the necessary expression level of the enzymes lowered.   Questions of interest include (but not limited to): What are the mechanistic details by which these efficiency gains are achieved?  How can further control, and consequently titer improvements, be gained?  How do these processes compare to those used in natural systems?  Can these strategies be applied to other biological systems?

Selected Publications

Dueber, J.E.*, Wu, G.C, Malmirchegini, G.R., Moon, T.S., Petzold C.J., Ullal, A.V., Prather, K.L.J., Keasling, J.D. “Synthetic protein scaffolds provide modular control over flux through an engineered metabolic pathway.” Nature Biotechnol. 27:753-9, Aug 2009.  

Dueber, J.E., Mirsky, E.A., Lim, W.A.*.  “Engineering synthetic signaling proteins with ultrasensitive input/output control. Nat Biotechnol. 25(6):660-2, May 2007.  

Dueber, J.E., Yeh, B.J., Bhattacharyya, R.P., Lim, W.A.* “Rewiring cell signaling: the logic and plasticity of eukaryotic protein circuitry.” Curr Opin Struct Biol 14(6):690-9, Dec 2004.  

Dueber, J.E., Yeh, B.J., Chak K., Lim, W.A.* “Reprogramming control of an allosteric signaling switch through modular recombination.” Science 301(5641):1904-8, Sep 2003.  

*Corresponding author