My journey in research started with an UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Project) research project in 2004 on understanding the effect of ammonium on the adsorption of copper by local seaweed. This project taught me the rigors and discipline required in research, as well as the logistics revolving around a research project.
Having gained valuable experience in biosorption by seaweed, I continued in the same lab of Prof. Paul Chen Jiaping in looking into the feasibility of using local seaweed to adsorb cationic and anionic dyes. Results revealed that anionic dyes such as Reactive Black 5 could not be effectively adsorbed by the negatively charged seaweed surface, and the project was tuned to focus on the sorption of Basic Yellow 11 by formaldehyde crosslinked seaweed.
My next stop was a masters research project in environmental microbiology in Prof. Ting Yen Peng’s lab in NUS Chemical Engineering in 2007. Initially, I was interested in looking into how different cell inactivation methods affect the surface properties of Escherichia coli, and their implications on biosorption. However, difficulties in obtaining enough cells for the project prompted a side detour to formulate a high cell density medium for cultivating E. coli, as well as a methodology inquiry on how wash buffers affect the zeta potential or surface charge of bacterial cells. Finally, a pure curiosity driven project led me to formulate a colourless agar medium that was used in profiling the microbial diversity in deionized water samples.
Love for synthetic biology in general and metabolic engineering in particular motivated me to join the lab of Prof. Zhou Kang in NUS Chemical Engineering in 2018 to pursue the project of developing an ethanol utilisation pathway based NADH regeneration system in Escherichia coli.
In between 2012 and 2018, I have the freedom to pursue my research interests in myriad fields such as ribosomal proteins and its role in bacterial phylogeny, economics topics in currency and trade, and microbial identification by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) as a citizen scientist.
Category: chemical engineering, biochemistry, microbiology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, synthetic biology, systems biology,
Tags: biosorption, medium formulation, colourless agar, ribosomal proteins, ethanol utilisation pathway, cell inactivation, zeta potential analysis,
Looking at life with a scientific lens 