Prof. Kiran Patil, MRC Toxicology Unit, University of Cambridge, UK
An adult individual typically harbours a few hundred grams of bacteria in their digestive tract. Recent findings have brought forward the fundamental role of this microbiota in determining drug efficacy, mode of action and side effects. Yet, such interactions at the microbiome level remain unknown for the vast majority of the drugs and for other xenobiotics that we are exposed to (e.g. food contaminants like pesticides). The overarching goal of Kiran’s research programme is to discover and model complex (xeno-) metabolic networks emerging in the gut microbiota and thereby gain mechanistic insights into microbiome-mediated toxicity. To this end, this interdisciplinary programme brings together computational (metabolic modelling, bioinformatics, chemo-informatics and machine learning) and experimental (in vitro microbiomics, metabolomics and chemical genomics) approaches.
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Prof. Geoff Baldwin, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London UK
Professor of Synthetic & Molecular Biology at Imperial College London, he is Co-Director of the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in BioDesign Engineering. He has spent his career at the interface of the physical and life sciences. He has also crossed the boundary to engineering in the field of synthetic biology and more recent interests include enhancing data-led approaches through the integration of AI.
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Prof. Sarel-Jacob Fleishman, Laboratory for Protein Design, Weizmann Insitute of Science, Israel
Our research combines computational methods development, including atomistic modeling and AI, and structural and biochemical wet-lab work. We probe our understanding of protein design principles by designing new proteins and testing their activities in the lab. We are committed to making methods accessible to all scientists, and our algorithms have enabled us and researchers from around the world to design antibodies, vaccines, therapeutic enzymes, and enzymes for green chemistry. We are excited to see protein design enabling the next wave of discovery in basic and applied biomolecular research.
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Dr. Marie-Thérèse Giudici-Orticoni, Adaptation systems of bacteria, Bioenergetics and Protein Engineering, France
The fascinating ability of bacteria to evolve in changing environments relies on complex adaptive systems. Some of these are studied in the group: we seek to understand the mechanisms that enable bacteria to modify their metabolism to utilize available resources, to reorganize gene expression using alternative transcription factors, to ensure the correct folding of proteins and protect them according to the stresses encountered, to move towards nutritive compounds or flee from toxicants, and finally to adapt as a population by forming biofilms or using resources produced by other species within bacterial consortia. These studies are carried out at several scales, from the molecular to the cellular to the multi-cellular.
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Dr Nadanai Laohakunakorn, Institute of Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology, University of Edinburgh, UK
Synthetic biology is a rapidly growing field set to make profound impact in numerous industries including manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and sustainable energy, as well as our fundamental understanding of life itself. However, engineering synthetic biological systems reliably has proven to be a tremendously challenging task. One promising approach is to use cell-free gene expression systems. These are in vitro systems that mimic the cellular environment and can be integrated with microfluidic technologies to rapidly prototype and screen synthetic gene circuits, prior to their deployment in vivo. This speeds up the synthetic biology design cycle, but also perhaps more powerfully, releases gene expression from the confines of the cell. In this way, the cell-free extracts themselves can be viewed as functional aqueous solutions, programmed by DNA.
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Prof. Sotirios Kampranis, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Danemark
My group has pioneered the development of tools and applications in the following areas of Biochemical Engineering:
• Identification, characterization, and optimization through protein engineering of enzymes involved in biosynthetic pathways of plant specialized metabolites.
• Metabolic engineering of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the bioproduction of high-value plant specialized metabolites, focusing on terpenoids, cannabinoids, and alkaloids.
• Production of non-canonical new-to-nature plant specialized metabolites by the combination of protein and metabolic engineering.
• Development of yeast-based whole-cell biosensors for the determination of plant specialized metabolites.
• Development of continuous mutagenesis-based in vivo directed evolution methods for the optimization of cell factories and biosynthetic enzymes.
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Dr. Olivier Destaing, Institute for Advances Biosciences, Grenoble, France
