from the hub
Miami’s Real Beauty By President Greg Crawford A walk through our campus sometimes evokes the
past. Red-brick buildings and stone bridges have greeted visitors for generations. Parents show their children where they lived or went to class. Students still gather in the grass outside Upham Hall to study classic literature. A closer look reveals a dynamic community embracing its future. Our students come to Miami not only to learn what’s already known — but to create new knowledge. It is so exciting to watch them alongside their mentoring professors. One example of many that I could share with you is of chemical, paper, and bioengineering assistant professor Andrew Jones. Through metabolic engineering, he and his lab of students have discovered a rapid way to produce psilocybin, a psychedelic drug found in mushrooms that shows great promise for treating depression and addiction. Currently, mass producing psilocybin requires extensive real estate and time. Alternative synthetic chemical “ Once we production methods are being used, but they are extremely expensive. transferred the Determined to find a solution that mainDNA, we saw a tains biological integrity and reduces production costs, Professor Jones and his team tiny peak emerge developed a series of experiments to identify in our data. We optimal psilocybin production conditions. Their work involved taking DNA from the knew we had done mushroom and putting it in E. coli. Their something huge.” result is a significant step toward demonLexie Adams ’21 strating the feasibility of producing the drug economically from a biological source. As Jones explains it, “It’s similar to the way you make beer, through a fermentation process. We are effectively taking the technology that allows for scale and speed of production and applying it to our psilocybin-producing E. coli.” What’s truly amazing is that during the course of this study, they have improved production from only a few milligrams per liter to over a gram per liter, a near 500-fold increase.
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Although the basic idea was Professor Jones’, he gives much credit and praise to his students, who designed many of the experiments. “Early on, I would help guide them. Toward the end, they were becoming more independent. That’s the type of student we want as they near graduation.” Professor Jones is so right. While a junior, Lexie Adams has made Miami proud by serving as lead author on a peer-reviewed article of the Jones lab’s findings. The article was published in the prestigious scientific journal Metabolic Engineering. A chemical engineering and premed co-major who became a member of the research team her first semester, Lexie has said she will never forget the thrilling moment they discovered their breakthrough. “Once we transferred the DNA, we saw a tiny peak emerge in our data. We knew we had done something huge.” As Lexie’s lab partners prepare to prepare to gradYou are invited to write to uate, they are passing down President Greg Crawford what they have learned at president@MiamiOH.edu. Follow him on Twitter to new undergraduates @PresGreg. joining Professor Jones’ lab. Together, professor and students will pursue ways to make E. coli a better host — the next step toward enabling sustainable production levels required by the pharmaceutical industry. With utmost respect to poet Robert Frost for calling Miami the most beautiful campus that ever there was, I believe the real beauty and distinctiveness of this place is its people, such as Professor Jones and his student researchers striving to help others. Each day I see tangible examples of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni living out Love and Honor through their studies, teaching, scholarship, work, and outreach.