Our Research
Some examples of our lab's research
Microbes for Agriculture
With climate change driving harsher conditions, we’re focused on microbial solutions—like plant growth-promoting bacteria—that improve crop performance, boost resilience, and offer eco-friendly alternatives to synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Our lab develops engineered Azospirillum strains tailored for specific soil environments to support sustainable agriculture. We’ve established a full genetic toolkit for Azo for the first time, including broad-host plasmids, synthetic promoters, terminators, and post-transcriptional regulators using synthetic sRNAs. These parts are Start-Stop compatible for rapid combinatorial assembly. We combine gene silencing with adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) and UV-ALE in mini-bioreactors to evolve strains with enhanced traits like thermotolerance.
Synthetic Metabolism
We engineer a variety of bacteria for the production of industrially-important compounds and polymers. We’ve built a toolkit of synthetic promoters and sRNAs for precise gene regulation in our bacteria of choice, enabling us to reprogram metabolism without gene deletions. We use synthetic metabolic feedback circuits to drive carbon and electrons towards the new molecules of choice and then optimise our microbial cell factories using a combination of synthetic biology, adaptive laboratory evolution, computational protein design, liquid-handling automation and mini bioreactors. We also engineer one-pot chop and change assembly systems for chimeric membrane protein assembly and rapid testing, important for driving new metabolic pathways that require the bioenergetics of the membrane for function.
We also have an ongoing commercialisation effort in the Smart Agricultural Biologicals space, please check our our site: gains.bio