Seminar series news / February 16, 2018

Dr Simon Moore will speak to WISB, and the wider Life Sciences community, on Thursday 22nd February about his research on cell-free-transcription, translation and biosynthesis. Simon is a Faculty Research Fellow in Paul Freemont’s group at Imperial College London. An abstract of his talk is included below.

More information on Simon’s research an be found on his ResearchGate profile.

If you are interested in attending, please contact wisb@warick.ac.uk.

Talk title: Cell-Free – Transcription, Translation and Biosynthesis

Talk abstract: Cell-free (or in vitro transcription-translation) synthetic biology is a fast evolving “test-bed” technology for studying genetic circuit design, biosensors, metabolic engineering and the development of minimal cell systems. This talk will discuss the current opportunities within cell-free, along with presenting the recent development of two new bacterial cell-free systems for high-throughput screening applications.

Firstly, using an industrially relevent Bacillus strain that specialises in recombinant protein production, I will demonstrate an automated experimental and modelling workflow to create a “blueprint” of gene expression dynamics and resource (energy, ribosomes) competition in cell-free. This cell-free system is also scalable for rapid and automated screening of ~100-1000s of library DNA parts and promoter systems (inducible and constitutive) that are native to the host. This approach is potentially expandable to a whole range of cell-free systems (e.g. mammalian, bacterial, fungal) for high-throughput screening applications in biotechnology.

Finally, the second part of the talk, will introduce and discuss the recent development of a Streptomyces cell-free system for the expression of high G+C (%) genes and it’s potential utility for studying Streptomyces genetic tools and natural product biosynthesis.