Lea Mbengi
Papers
1
Total Citations
15
H-Index
1
About
Lea Mbengi is a rising figure in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, whose work centers on the intersection of automation and microbial evolution. Her primary research focus is the development of robotic workflows to accelerate adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE), a technique that harnesses natural selection to engineer microbial strains for industrial and environmental applications. Her most cited work, "Robotic workflows for automated long-term adaptive laboratory evolution: improving ethanol utilization by Corynebacterium glutamicum" (2023, 15 citations), exemplifies this contribution. In this study, Mbengi pioneered a fully automated, high-throughput platform that enables long-term, hands-off evolution experiments, successfully adapting *Corynebacterium glutamicum*—a key industrial bacterium—to utilize ethanol as a carbon source. This breakthrough not only demonstrates a novel approach to strain engineering for alternative substrates but also significantly reduces the labor and time constraints of traditional ALE. Though early in her career, Mbengi’s work is already recognized for its potential to democratize and scale evolutionary engineering, making her a notable innovator in the push toward sustainable bioproduction.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
- 1