Jonathan Trent
Scientist
Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate
NASA Ames Research Center
United States of America
Biography
Jonathan Trent invented OMEGA to grow oil-producing algae on municipal wastewater and leads the multidisciplinary OMEGA team to test the feasibility of the OMEGA concept. After receiving his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Trent spent six years at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and the University of Paris at Orsay in France. He returned to the United States to work at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale Medical School for two years before establishing a biotechnology group at Argonne National Laboratory. In 1998 he began work at NASA's Ames Research Center to be part of NASA's Astrobiology program and established the Protein Nanotechnology Group in 1999.
Research Interest
nanostructures using biomolecules from extremophiles-organisms adapted to extreme environments, such as high temperatures, high or low pH, ionizing radiation, or saturated salts.
Publications
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McMillan RA, Paavola CD, Howard J, Chan SL, Zaluzec NJ, Trent JD. Ordered nanoparticle arrays formed on engineered chaperonin protein templates. Nature materials. 2002 Dec 1;1(4):247.
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McMillan RA, Howard J, Zaluzec NJ, Kagawa HK, Mogul R, Li YF, Paavola CD, Trent JD. A self-assembling protein template for constrained synthesis and patterning of nanoparticle arrays. Journal of the American Chemical Society. 2005 Mar 9;127(9):2800-1.
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Des Marais DJ, Allamandola LJ, Benner SA, Boss AP, Deamer D, Falkowski PG, Farmer JD, Hedges SB, Jakosky BM, Knoll AH, Liskowsky DR. The NASA astrobiology roadmap. Astrobiology. 2003 Jun 1;3(2):219-35.
