Synthetic Cells and Systems
Pr. Jon Cooper, Dr. Julien Reboud, Pr. Huabing Yin
Synthetic biology looks into the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not already found in nature and the recreation of natural systems synthetically in the lab. Microtechnologies can be used to advantage in synthetic biology to control small amounts of fluids and to pattern substrates onto which the biology can be attached.
Using a “bottom-up approach” of assembling components, such as biochemical pathways, this has the potential to exploit our biological understanding in much the same way that circuit design enabled electronics. Our research is focused on all the different scales of Synthetic Biology.
At the molecular scale, we develop synthetic recombinase systems for use in the rapid generation, evolution and optimisation of gene circuits and metabolic pathways. These techniques have also been used in our labs to assemble molecular constructs on surfaces using microarray technologies.
At the cellular level, we are creating artificial cell surrogates, or protocells, which enable biochemical pathways to be reconstructed, to perform complex processing steps. We have already expressed membrane-associated proteins in such protocells and watched them assemble in the artificial cells using time-resolved techniques.
Using microfluidic devices, we integrate all these different platforms to address several of the issues that currently hinder the rational design of gene circuits. We are interested in developing this platform for parallel, high-throughput in vitro assays, and the idea that by miniaturising laboratory functions microfluidics could permit large-scale 'prototyping' of synthetic constructs.
