Building a multibillion-dollarsynthetic biology industry. Engineering the future with Synthetic Biology. Currently a multi-million dollar industry set to be come a multi-billion dollar industry. The leading synthetic biology conference of 2019 is taking place in London, UK. A diverse panel of speakers from across the world will share their opinions, insights and expertise
Register here: https://www.synbitech.com/
The SYNBIOCHEM Centre is part of an exciting new H2020 EU collaboration, ShikiFactory 100, worth 8 million Euros. This project gathers together 11 partners from 7 countries with the aim to produce over 100 high value compounds from the shikimate pathway, a hub of cell metabolism, through the development of an optimised chassis and implementation of novel biosynthetic routes for the production of known and new to nature molecules. Read more here
The Micklefield Lab’s latest paper has just been published in Nature Catalysis. The paper describes the discovery of a new biosynthetic pathway, with a highly unusual carboxylase enzyme (MloH), producing a structurally unique antibiotic malonomycin. The new findings might lead to the discovery of new antibiotics and may also provide new ways of making antibiotics which are urgently needed to combat emerging drug-resistant pathogens.
SYNBIOCHEM Co-director Eriko Takano is a founding participant in this new network which is one of eight networks awarded funding within the JPIAMR 2018 call for transnational networks “Building the Foundation of the JPIAMR Virtual Research Institute”. Each funded network will receive €50,000 to establish expertise clusters to identify research community needs and develop ideas to form the foundation for the JPIAMR Virtual Research Institute (JPIAMR-VRI). The IRAADD network includes internationally renowned groups with excellence in AMR research focussing on early stages of antibiotic discovery and development. This expert team will include natural products researchers, medical microbiologists, bioinformaticians, medicinal chemists and target-based drug designers, as well advisory partners from global alliances focussing on antibiotic development such as DNDi/GARDP and IMI-ENABLE. The network partners ill set up a cooperative platform to allow the sharing of scientific research data, translational knowledge and expert advice for the strategic development of new and advanced projects with the aim to take collaborative scientific research in the early stages of antibiotics discovery and development to a new level.
Find out more here
SynbiCITE launches new five-year strategy. Dedicated to promoting the adoption and use of synthetic biology by industry, SynbiCITE has announded the launch of a new 5-year strategy underpinned by a new £5M grant from UK Research and Innovation and other sources. SynbiCITE 2.0 aims to expand and develop SynbiCITE’s reach within the UK’s synthetic biology innovation and academic ecosystem, and create a single highly interconnected UK innovation cluster.
This will be driven through:
IBISBA: Industrial Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology Accelerator
SYNBIOCHEM is part of IBISBA 1.0, a H2020 funded infrastructure project that aims to create a pan-European network of research infrastructures that will support research in industrial biotechnology.
This project brings together R&D facilities from 9 EU member states (including the University of Manchester, SYNBIOCHEM and FAIRDOM data management) and access to first class infrastructure.
On 11th September the European Science Forum for Research Infra-structure will launch the 2018 European Infra-structure Roadmap which will include IBISBA. This ESFRI recognition of IBISBA opens up development that will allow IBISBA to create services that aim to accelerate the preindustrial R&D phases of bioprocess development, thus supporting industrial biotechnology and promoting its role as a key enabling technology of the bio-economy. Read more here:pr_IBISBA SYNBIOCHEM 2
A transnational access programme (Launching 17th September 2018) will provide a mechanism to access IBISBA training and equipment by the wider scientific community. Please see website for information.
What is Responsible Research and Innovation? Barbara Ribeiro and Philip Shapira have written a short briefing paper that provides an overview of responsible research and innovation (RRI), with concise highlights about principles of responsibility, the emergence of RRI in the UK and Europe, the EPSRC AREA framework, and RRI in Manchester. To read, go to: http://synbiochem.co.uk/rri-manchester-perspective/
The SYNBIOCHEM automated pipeline for the discovery and optimisation of biosynthetic pathways for microbial production of fine chemicals has been published in Nature: Communications Biology.
The microbial production of fine and speciality chemicals promises to deliver bio-sustainable manufacturing solutions of the future. In this article we present an integrated Design-Build-Test-Learn pipeline which is designed to be agnostic to target compound and applicable to any chemical compound of interest. The paper demonstrates the application of the pipeline for 2 of our core chemical classes with improved production titres.
Article can be found: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0076-9
Scientists have created a new way of speeding up the genome evolution of baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast we use for bread and beer production.
This is to develop a synthetic yeast strain that can be transformed on demand, making it particularly attractive for industrial biotechnology applications, such as the mass production of advanced medicines to treat illnesses such as Malaria and Tuberculosis (TB). It could also have massive implications for the future study of DNA.
Led by Professor Patrick Cai at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, in collaboration with Prof. Junbiao Dai from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, two back-to-back papers are being published in Nature Communications on May 22nd, 2018.
C3 Biotechnologies Ltd is taking part in eForFuel, an exciting EU-funded research and innovation initiative that seeks to provide a sustainable replacement of fossil fuels by using electricity and microorganisms to convert CO2 into renewable fuels.
Updates can be found at www.eforfuel.eu and on Twitter @eforfuel
