Chemistry and Biochemistry Assistant Professor Dr. Konrad Meister was recently invited to give a lightning talk about his research on novel fungal ice-nucleating proteins as part of Boise State’s TRANSFORM project. Boise State is one of eighteen academic institutions to participate in the Accelerating Research Translation (ART) program from the National Science Foundation (NSF), aimed to “increase the scale and pace of advancing discoveries made while conducting academic research into tangible solutions that benefit the public.”
Dr. Meister was one of few Boise State researchers invited to TRANSFORM’s fall kick-off event, representing the College of Arts & Sciences as a “rising star.” Each college had one senior faculty member and one rising star invited to give lightning talks on their NSF TRANSFORM grant-funded research. The NSF TRANSFORM grant is designed to promote translational research, broadly defined as the process of moving research discoveries from universities out into the communities they serve, using faculty, staff and students’ skills, expertise and knowledge in partnership with external organizations.
Based on a recent patent filed with Boise State, the Meister Research Group was awarded a $50,000 NSF TRANSFORM grant to establish a pipeline for the purification and scalable production of fungal ice-nucleating proteins (INPs) in collaboration with Hyacinth Proteins, an Idaho-based company specialized in the isolation of bioactive proteins under native conditions. Ice-nucleating proteins catalyze ice formation at high subzero temperatures, enabling biological control of freezing. However, currently available INPs are bacterial-derived, and their use in food processing, medical applications, and snow-making in some locations is limited due to regulatory restrictions and health and safety concerns related to the introduction of inactivated bacteria into sterile or protected environments. The Meister Group and their collaborators have developed fungal-derived INPs that are stable under changing environmental conditions such as pH and temperature, allowing them to be isolated and purified for use in applications where the introduction of bacterial INPs present safety or environmental concerns.
The group’s work under this grant focuses on two main objectives: optimizing growth conditions and INP extraction protocols from fungal cultures to enable direct, high-yield protein purification, and establishing heterologous expression of fungal INPs in microbial hosts such as yeast, with the goal of enhancing INP production yield and scalability. Their effort will generate reproducible methods for producing fungal INPs and lay the groundwork for their use in sectors such as food sciences, cryopreservation and cloud seeding.
Dr. Konrad Meister was also awarded another grant to continue work on a separate project, in collaboration with Boise State’s Dr. Sophia Theodossiou, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering. They received a $50,000 Early-Stage Product Development Award from the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) for their project “Silk Microneedle Patches for Novel Biologics Delivery.”