Filippo Federici Research Assistant 
As an Italian, I like to teach people what they should eat. For my Ph.D., I decided to accept a bigger challenge: teaching Pseudomonas putida to eat CO2.
Research
Nowadays, the production of value-added relies chemicals relies either on unsustainable fossil carbon or on simple sugars, whose utilization directly competes with human consumption. CO2 is the main GHG and its removal from atmosphere could have a great influence on the reversion of Global Warming. At the same time, this gas is also a freely available source of carbon. Engineering industrial microbial hosts to grow on CO2 and produce useful chemicals could tackle both the problems at the same time. For my Ph.D., I plan to use the methods and tools of Synthetic Biology to engineer autotrophy in the environmental bacterium and established bioproduction host Pseudomonas putida, exploring both natural and synthetic CO2 fixation pathways.