My research seeks to push synthetic biology beyond the design and construction of small sets of interacting genes and regulators and instead scale this work to the engineering of whole chromosomes and genomes. In my group at Imperial College London, we predominantly focus on using baker’s yeast as a testbed for developing new tools, methods and design principles for whole-chromosome construction. We were part of the international Synthetic Yeast Genome (Sc2.0) project to create a synthetic yeast genome and are now extending this work, developing AI-designed chromosomes for application-specific yeast.
At the LMB, we collaborate with Julian Sale’s group to develop and optimise methods to design, construct, edit and rearrange DNA up to a million bases in length and move this DNA from microbial cells into mammalian cells to test its function. This technology opens up entirely new approaches to test DNA functions at new scales in medically relevant organisms.