text: Ujor Laboratory - Department of Food Science
  Ujor Laboratory
  The research interests of the Ujor Lab include fermentation science, renewable fuels and bio-chemicals, metabolic engineering/synthetic biology, bioprocess design, bioconversion of food wastes and agricultural residues to value-added products.
  Synthetic Biology/Metabolic Engineering: Towards enhanced bio-chemicals production, we deploy synthetic biology to engineer robust bio-chemicals-producing microbial strains. Additionally, we seek to unravel and circumvent metabolic and feedstock-mediated bottlenecks that limit the biosynthesis of target chemicals with wide ranging applications including biofuels and chemicals involved in the production of paints, varnishes, synthetic tire and a variety of industrially important polymers.
  Repurposing Recalcitrant Effluents: With increasing pressure on water resources and dryer summers, water-rich effluents such as anaerobic digestate, tannery and fish processing effluents could become rich sources of fermentative nutrients, producing effluents that are more economically amenable to treatment. Therefore, identifying and engineering microbial strains with robust capacities to sequester greater amounts of nutrients from such effluents could herald a new paradigm in waste management and water recovery from waste. Thus, our efforts seek to identify and engineer such strains for efficient nutrient removal from recalcitrant wastes, whilst producing value-added chemicals.