###Designing Nonconventional Hosts for Large-Scale Biomanufacturing Applications
Project ID: 2228bd1209 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Manufacturing The Future
UCL Lead department: Biochemical Engineering
Lead Supervisor: Duygu Dikicioglu
Project Summary:
Microbial microorganisms proved to be very feasible tools for the manufacturing of value added or specialty products. Novel species emerge as potential new hosts for industrial applications due to their superior performance characteristics that give them an advantage in an industrial setting. Halomonas spp. are of particular interest owing to their resilience to withstand high salt concentrations thus removing the high energy requirements and costs typically associated with sterilization and maintenance of asepticity. However, as with any cell host, well-defined rules do not exist for directly translating our understanding of the system obtained at the lab scale into manufacturing.
This project will look to explore ways of overcoming such limitations Halomonas faces during scale up of fermentation. A suitable strain and a multispecies host system with novel genetic and physiological characteristics will be developed and tested across different production scales. For this purpose, adaptive laboratory evolution will be used in conjunction with a design-build-test cycle to generate synthetic multispecies hosts for biomanufacturing applications. The host will also be characterised through omics approaches to identify the acquired metabolic traits and the syntropy across different species.
You will be working with experts in the field of microbial fermentation, scale-up, synthetic communities and adaptive laboratory evolution in this project. You will be trained in different aspects of industrial biotechnology, microbial fermentation, metabolic engineering, systems biology and omics-based analysis. You will also receive training on responsible research and innovation and will have the opportunity to develop your RRI agenda along with your project.
For this project, we are looking for enthusiastic individuals with background training and degree in biochemical engineering, chemical engineering, biochemistry, biotechnology, molecular biology, systems biology or related fields.