Engineering microbial phenotypes through rewiring of genetic networks.

The ability to program cellular behaviour is a major goal of synthetic biology, with applications in health, agriculture and chemicals production. Despite efforts to build 'orthogonal' systems, interactions between engineered genetic circuits and the endogenous regulatory network of a host cell can have a significant impact on desired functionality. We have developed a strategy to rewire the endogenous cellular regulatory network of yeast to enhance compatibility with synthetic protein and metabolite production.

One-Step Isothermal Assembly of DNA fragments.

The One-Step Isothermal DNA Assembly method allows for the efficient assembly of DNA constructs using fragments up to several hundred kilobases in as little as 15 min. Applications of this method range from the addition of promoters to expression constructs to the assembly of bacterial genome fragments. The production of circularized DNA using this method also enables the direct transformation of target organisms, bypassing intermediate transformations for plasmid propagation in those species where expression could lead to toxicity and cell death.