synthetic-biology

Engineering orthogonal ribosomes for real-time monitoring using fluorescence

A promising route to tackle the trade-off in cellular resources between synthetic protein production and cellular growth is to use a separate dedicated pool of orthogonal ribosomes to produce synthetic proteins. However, the optimisation of strains …

Protein metrology and biological circuit control

My work at Imperial on the quantitative characterisation and control of biological circuits for optimised microbial biotechnology applications.

Absolute protein quantification using fluorescence measurements with FPCountR

This paper presents a generalisable method for the calibration of fluorescence readings on microplate readers, in order to convert arbitrary fluorescence units into absolute units. FPCountR relies on the generation of bespoke fluorescent protein (FP) …

FPCountR- improved analytical methods enable absolute protein quantification

Contributed abstract to the 14th International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, Paris, France, October 24th-26th 2022.

Beyond fluorescein- Use of fluorescent protein calibrants for direct and absolute quantification of protein production in synthetic biology.

Directed Evolution

My work at UCL on directed evolution methods, using bacterial surface display for xenobiology.

Bacterial cell display as a robust and versatile platform for the engineering of low affinity ligands and enzymes

Directed evolution has been remarkably successful at expanding the chemical and functional boundaries of biology. That progress is heavily dependent on the robustness and flexibility of the available selection platforms, given the significant cost to …

Synthetic biology approaches to biological containment- pre-emptively tackling potential risks

Biocontainment comprises any strategy applied to ensure that harmful organisms are con- fined to controlled laboratory conditions and not allowed to escape into the environment. Genetically engineered microorganisms (GEMs), regardless of the nature …

Selection platforms for directed evolution in synthetic biology

Life on Earth is incredibly diverse. Yet, underneath that diversity, there are a number of constants and highly conserved processes- all life is based on DNA and RNA; the genetic code is universal; biology is limited to a small subset of potential …