Yajie WANG

The worldwide trend toward a low-carbon economy and the urge for sustainable manufacturing stimulates the development of next-generation, biobased, sustainable manufacturing processes.

Expanding the repertories of biocatalysts for more abiotic transformations is critical to enabling the biosynthesis of chemicals that can only be synthesized using chemical catalysts. And now the third generation (3G) uses CO2 to synthesize chemicals and can be treated as a negative CO2 emission process.

Yajie Wang demonstrated the compatibility between photocatalysts and enzymes, enabling cooperative chemoenzymatic processes beyond dynamic kinetics resolution and co-factor regeneration within the past 30 years.

Wang also assisted BASF in developing an automated high-throughput engineering platform to engineer S. cerevisiae with improved acidic tolerance and lactic acid productivity. Together with iBioFAB (The Illinois Biological Foundry for Advanced Biomanufacturing), she obtained the desired variant within ten days, about five times faster than the traditional strain engineering method.

Last year, Wang joined Westlake University and established the “Synthetic Biology and Biocatalysis” lab. She focuses on integrating synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, protein engineering, chemistry, material science, and machine learning to establish a “Design-Build-Test-Learn” platform to design and construct artificial chemo-bio hybrid, artificial photosynthetic systems to harness the synthetic power from both chemistry and biology.