RNA synthetic biology

在这个项目中，我们将开发有效的方法来预测我们DNA突变的影响。这一点很重要，因为国家正在对研究进行投资，以读取人们DNA中携带的突变。只有当我们知道个体突变的作用以及它们如何影响健康和疾病时，我们才能利用这些信息。我们的方法依赖于细胞培养模型。在这样的模型中，成千上万的细胞在烧瓶中一起生长，我们对每个细胞进行改造，使其在选定的基因中含有不同的突变。然后我们询问哪些突变导致细胞死亡，以及细胞的哪些部分受到每种突变的影响。然后，我们可以利用这些信息来预测哪些突变会导致疾病。我们与爱丁堡的生物医学研究人员合作，研究导致糖尿病、眼睛畸形和代谢紊乱的突变。

In this project, we will develop efficient methods to predict the effects of mutations in our DNA. This is important, due to the ongoing national investment in research to read out the mutations people carry in their DNA. We will only be able to use that information if we know what individual mutations are doing and how they may affect health and disease.Our methods rely on cell culture models. In such models, many thousands of cells are grown together in a flask, and we engineer every cell to contain a different mutation in a selected gene. We then ask which mutations cause the cells to die, and which parts of the cell are affected by each mutation.We can then use this information to predict which mutations cause disease. We have teamed up with biomedical researchers in Edinburgh to study mutations that cause diabetes, eye malformations, and metabolic disorders.