https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/index.htmlAbout me I’m an aspiring synthetic biologist interested in the intersection of SynBio, phage/microbial mechanism biology, and context-aware bioengineering. Some of my current projets focus chassis’ responses to engineering conditions and simulated environmental deployment. I’m also an iGEM alum (William & Mary 2025!), and I studied anti-phage defense systems at MIT this summer.Hugoenhttps://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/week-01-hw-project-ideas/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/week-01-hw-project-ideas/index.html(1) What you would like to biomanufacture and why? An often-quoted estimate predicts that antibiotic resistant infections will outpace cancer and heart disease as the global leading cause of death by 2050. Resistant bacteria are especially prevalent in hospital settings, where high antibiotic concentrations and large, diverse populations of pathogenic bacteria combine (within infected patients, in drains, etc) to drive rapid resistance evolution. Resistant bacteria are difficult to eliminate not only because 1), they, by definition, cannot be treated via traditional antibiotics, but also because, 2), they tend to form dense, sticky, and highly resilient biofilms. I want to biomanufacture something that combats antibiotic resistant pathogens – possibly via a phage-therapy based approach, taking advantage of automated and cloud-lab systems to design, engineer, and test a variety of modified phage at a large scale and create/identify promising anti-biofilm candidates against various bacterial pathogens.https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/week-02-dna-design/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/week-02-dna-design/index.htmlWhat molecule are you expressing? A protein, an RNA, or an enzyme (or small set of enzymes) for a pathway. If your HW1 product is a material, food, or chemical, identify the protein(s) that produce it and design for those. Per homework 1, I want to biomanufacture anti-biofilm phages on a large scale, engineering, testing, evolving, and producing the modified phages on a large scale to identify promising candidates for biofilm mitigation. This would likely involve CRISPR-based editing and/or assembly and rebooting of phages to stitch together modified components. For the purposes of this assignment, I will focus on designing an expression construct that overexpresses the mycobacteriophage SWU’s gp39 protein, which interferes with biofilm formation and increases the permeability of the Mycobacterial cell wall (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep28701). This protein could eventually be useful to engineer into other mycobacteriophages as a means of enhancing their ability to disrupt biofilms / infect in spite of them – but we may also want to test the effectiveness of the overexpressed protein on its own before we attempt phage engineering.https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/week-03-coopetition/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/week-03-coopetition/index.htmlA. COMPARE CELL-FREE REACTION COMPOSITIONS (20 minutes) Why does the concentration of potassium glutamate and magnesium glutamate differ between compositions? Which is more sensitive? The compositions require differnt pH conditions. Varying the concentrations of potassium glutamate and magnesium glutamate helps modify the pH across compositions. It’s also stoichiometrically helpful to have a compound that delivers two glutamates vs. one.https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/final-project/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/madeline-eibner-gebhardt/final-project/index.html