Our international team of world leading researchers are developing a new field in Synthetic Biology, termed ‘Portabolomics’. We are taking a novel approach to standardise the connection between a given genetic circuit and the chassis organism by the development of a ‘bio-adapter’. This will negate the need to re-engineer and re-test the circuit when moving it to another organism (or chassis).

Portabolomics is at the crossroads of the digital and bio economies and a true breakthrough in the portability of living systems – we want synthetic biologists to be able to engineer new microbial systems in the lab and then port these directly into another species on a large scale without the risk of any unpredictable outcomes.

A range of state-of-the-art computing approaches will be applied to understand the networks of molecular processes that occur in a bacterial cell. Together with our wet lab expertise in bacterial replication, transcription and translation we hope to develop a new system of major value to synthetic biology research and industry.

In parallel researchers in our team will explore the ethical, legal and social issues to inform a responsible design process for current and future work.

Jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Newcastle University and industry, the £7.5million project will investigate how advances in the Digital Economy and Synthetic Biology could be synergised to engineer new living systems that behave in a predictable way in order to make industrial uptake easier.

Contact

Tel: 0191 208 736
Fax: 0191 208 8232
Email: portabolomics@ncl.ac.uk