College of Science & Engineering

School/College	School of Biological Sciences/ College of Science and Engineering
Email	annegret.honsbein@ed.ac.uk
Telephone	0131 650 7514
Twitter	@inaahon

Research vision

The metabolic diversity of microbial species that can be isolated from the environment holds huge potential for Industrial Biotechnology. My personal interest is in photosynthetic microbes such as cyanobacteria, as they utilize the sun's energy for growth and product production directly, are able to thrive in salt or even waste water and contribute to carbon capture.

A general limitation in using Synthetic Biology to modify environmental microbes for industrial purposes is a very low transformation rate compared to the domesticated model species that have been selected and engineered over time for efficient uptake of foreign DNA. Often laborious procedures such as phage transduction and protoplast transformation are needed to achieve even modest transformation efficiencies.

Many transformation protocols are based on empirical or semi-empirical data. In the future, I would like to learn about and find ways to quantify the critical factors for microbial transformation in different protocols and based on this understanding develop new methods that facilitate efficient transformation of environmental non-model species.

Expectations from collaboration

• Collaborations with researchers from different fields to develop new transformation techniques.
• Collaborations with research labs that have developed new transformation protocols and are interested in working together on testing them in other non-model species of industrial interest.

Key Skills

• synthetic biology tool development,
• cyanobacteria culture,
• non-model strain engineering 

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First published: 7 May 2019