Research

• Enzyme cascades and cell factories
  Synthetic biology offers a framework through which the purposeful manipulation of biosynthetic pathways and cellular networks can be readily achieved, offering significant potential for accessing new chemical entities and the construction of optimized 'cell' factories for their production.
• Self-assembled systems and minimal cells
  Using bio-inspired modular approaches, in which stripped-down biological components and machinery are combined and re-engineered, BrisSynBio will design and construct synthetic micro-compartments containing functional biochemical components.
• Programming complexity in natural systems
  Synthetic biology offers the potential to modify natural and synthetic cell-based genetic programmes, either by reworking existing pathways or by introducing complete, designed, synthetic multi-component pathways.
• Genome editing in higher organisms
  New tools such as CRISPR are hugely expanding the range of organisms that can be rationally designed using synthetic biology approaches in higher organisms.
• Engineering and modelling across scales
  To contribute to the design and development of proteins and systems for synthetic biology BrisSynBio is using techniques ranging from: molecular models of protein dynamics and ligand binding; to quantum mechanical modelling of biochemical reactions; 'coarse-grained' models for modelling protein-protein, protein-DNA association and biological membranes; through to mathematical models of biological systems.