People

Adam Caparco


DiPietro Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Chemical Biology
Member of IPHI

📧 a.caparco@northeastern.edu
🌐 Caparco Lab
📍 EXP 530B

Question & Approach

As global agriculture faces mounting pressures from climate change and environmental degradation, there is an urgent need for sustainable alternatives to conventional farming practices that rely heavily on chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. The Caparco lab addresses this challenge by investigating how biotechnology, particularly engineered proteins and plant-based systems, can create more sustainable and environmentally-friendly agricultural solutions.

Their approach combines three innovative strategies: engineering plant secretion pathways to enhance natural crop protection mechanisms, developing enzymatic materials for green chemical synthesis, and utilizing plant virus nanoparticles for targeted delivery of protective compounds. The lab employs cutting-edge techniques including multi-omics analysis, fusion protein design, metagenomic screening, and nanoparticle engineering to create biotechnology solutions that work in harmony with natural systems. This work aims to reduce agriculture’s environmental impact while maintaining or improving crop yields through more precise and sustainable interventions.

Bio

Dr. Adam Caparco is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University with a joint appointment between the Department of Chemical Engineering (75%) and the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (25%), and a member of the Institute for Plant-Human Interface (IPHI). Prior to joining Northeastern, he served as a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego in the Steinmetz Lab, where he developed novel approaches for using plant virus nanoparticles in agricultural applications, focusing on soil delivery systems and plant protection strategies. He completed his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020 under the co-advisement of Professors Julie Champion and Andreas Bommarius, where his research focused on enzyme immobilization and biocatalysis, developing innovative strategies for protein-inorganic particle synthesis and characterizing complex enzyme systems. During his Ph.D., he was awarded a STEM Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research at the University of Paris-Saclay/CEA, where he contributed to the discovery of novel amine dehydrogenases through metagenomic mining. He earned his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with a minor in Environmental Engineering from UCLA in 2015.

Key Publications

Caparco AA, González-Gamboa I, Chang-Liao S, Steinmetz NF. A plug-and-play strategy for agrochemical delivery using a plant virus nanotechnology. Journal of Nanoparticle Research. 2024;26: 1–14.

Caparco AA, González-Gamboa I, Hays SS, Pokorski JK, Steinmetz NF. Delivery of Nematicides Using TMGMV-Derived Spherical Nanoparticles. Nano Letters. 2023;23: 5785-5793.

Caparco AA, Dautel DR, Champion JA. Protein Mediated Enzyme Immobilization. Small. 2022;18: e2106425.

Caparco AA, Bommarius BR, Bommarius AS, Champion JA. Protein-inorganic calcium-phosphate supraparticles as a robust platform for enzyme co-immobilization. Biotechnology and Bioengineering. 2020;117: 1979–1989.

Caparco AA, Bommarius AS, Champion JA. Effect of peptide linker length and composition on immobilization and catalysis of leucine zipper-enzyme fusion proteins. AIChE Journal. 2018;64: 2934–2946.


Full list of publications on Google Scholar

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