Biosynthetic pathway design and optimisation

Within the MIB we develop and implement a broad range of synthetic biology tools, concepts and technologies.

These are used to improve the productivity and robustness of engineered biosynthetic pathways for the production of chemicals, materials, fuels.

We have at our disposal a new fully integrated robotics platform for directed evolution and synthetic biology workflows.

We have developed an automated design / build / test / learn pipeline, which includes:

• computational design tools for pathway and enzyme parts selection through to DNA construct assembly workflows,
• high throughout instrumentation, including pipette-based and acoustic-based liquid handling robotics for automated enzyme screening, pathway assembly, chassis engineering, and product extraction.

Equipment also provides automated colony picking, next generation sequencing, and chromatography and mass spectrometry-based analysis.

Research applications

Our work in the automation of the design, build and test cycle offers great promise to revolutionise the way we discover, develop and produce new chemicals, therapeutics and materials.