Events

Date: 11 December 2024   Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Location: Bancroft 1.02.6

Merging Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Chemistry
Prof. Stephen Wallace
Chair of Chemical Biotechnology and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK

The emerging field of biocompatible chemistry aims to combine the synthetic flexibility of chemo-catalytic reactions with the genetic programmability and sustainability benefits of microbial metabolism. This enables synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry tools to be merged, creating new metabolic pathways to industrial small molecules by fermentation. In my talk I will present our most recent work in this area using biocompatible Pd catalysts bound to the cell membrane of living bacteria to intercept metabolic hydrogen gas generated from D-glucose for alkene hydrogenation. Furthermore, through multiplexed biosynthesis I will outline how we can engineer bacteria to produce substrates and reagents for hydrogenation reactions simultaneously and hint towards the use of higher-level genetic engineering strategies to enable more complex synthetic pathways, sustainable reagents and chemistries, and membrane anchoring strategies for future applications in engineering biology. Overall, this work highlights the possibilities offered through the design and manipulation of microbial chemistry for chemical synthesis.