Michaela A. Jones

This paper demonstrates the use of non-canonical amino acids to enable plant-directed control of bacterial activity in soil.

This paper designs an exclusive obligate symbiosis to create a biological containment system where one microbe produces a non-standard amino acid, and another depends on it for survival, demonstrating a chemical-to-biological dependence for biocontainment.

This paper describes a one-pot biocatalytic cascade using PLP-dependent enzymes to synthesize diverse L-phenylalanine derivatives from aldehydes and carboxylic acids under mild conditions.

This paper presents a modular bacterial system for biosynthesizing and incorporating phenylalanine derivatives into proteins using achiral building blocks, reducing reliance on complex chemical synthesis.

The paper demonstrates that genome engineering of E. coli improves TPAL retention and enables its conversion to valuable products like para-xylylenediamine.

The paper continuously evolves a synthetic auxotrophic E. coli strain and finds it remains contained over 100 days and in co-culture with mammalian cells.