Sensing and regulation for autonomous biomanufacturing control

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Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering offer methods to develop new biosynthetic routes and hosts for the production of chemicals, biopolymers and fuels. As such we can reduce our reliance on petrol-chemical based feedstocks by providing new sustainable production routes for drop in chemicals and develop new chemical entities with advanced properties. A major challenge with biomanufacturing from microbial host is the need to balance the cells viability/growth with the biotechnological production demands. For example, high-producing clones can often suffer from limited growth, due to the burden/demand of recombinant production, and thus lead to low overall titres. This PhD project will seek to develop genetic tools to sense and regulate molecular signals and genes respectively, to permit Autonomous Biomanufacturing Control. This will involve transcriptomics (temporal expression analysis), bioinformatics, promoter engineering (library generation, high-throughput screening and sequence-function analysis), and temporal promoter development (generation of design rules, performance optimisation and application). This project and training will equip you with skills in advanced synthetic biology, data mining and analysis suitable for future careers in both academia or industry.