01/10/2024 - Welcome Donny!
Donny Chang will be joining us for his final year dissertation project.
He will be working on analysing the dynamics of a toggle switch within
a microbial community.
30/09/2024 - Goodbye to Paul!
We say goodbye to Paul. Having finished his Master's thesis with us, he
is going on to do a PhD at Cambridge University.
17/09/2024 - Louie at EMBL
Louie travelled to Heidelberg to attend the EMBO workshop on Synthetic
Biology in Action. I (Alex) attended the first of these workshops when
I started my PhD and found it to be a fantastic experience.
05/09/2024 - Congratulations to Mod!
Congratualtions to Mod on her graduation. She is going off to York to do
a Masters in Bioinformatics. We will be excited to see her progress.
04/09/2024 - Scheduled fun!
Once again, we got together to have some food and play games. Despite
Alice perpetually avoiding being photographed, she somehow always ends
up on the winning team.
05/08/2024 - Some fermentation fun!
Casey is bringing the lab into the kitchen. She has been fermenting the
first batch of (non-alcoholic) rice wine. We are all excited to see how
it turns out.
27/07/2024 - A bacteriocin expression platform
Jack and Linda, from the Barnes group, have published a paper on
targeting pathogenic bacteria with bacteriocins.
27/06/2024 - Review on Synthetic Microbial Communities published
All three PhD students in the group contributed to a review titled
Synthetic microbial ecology: engineering habitats for modular consortia
, published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology.
05/06/2024 - Engineering Biology at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Casey and I were invited to attend a workshop at the Nuffield Council
on Bioethics. It was a fantastic opportunity to
discuss the ethical implications of our work
with a diverse group of experts, most of whom were not scientists.
30/05/2024 - Goodbye to Mod!
Today Mod gave her final project presentation and we bid her farewell.
14/05/2024 - British delegation to EBRC
It was excellent to be invited to join a British delegation of
synthetic biologists to the US. We had a fantastic dinner at the
British consular residence in Atlanta, and a fascinating day with the
faculty at Georgia Tech. Most of our time was spent attending the
Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) annual meeting, where I
was lucky enough to present some of our work on engineering microbial
communities.
13/05/2024 - New pre-print
Chania from Chris Barnes' group
has a new pre-print on bioRxiv, looking at a micro-compartment in
E. coli Nissle, that may be useful for future microbiome engineering
applications.
08/05/2024 - Microbiolgy workshop at Goldsmiths
Louie was invited to introduce some students at Goldsmiths University
to the fun of microbiology. They learned about our work in synthetic
biology, and spent the day learning how to culture environmental
microbes. It will be really exciting to see where their creativity will
take these concepts.
30/04/2024 - Goodbye to Griffin!
Griffin has finished his thesis on using ABC SMC to design microbial
communities, and we bid him farewell.
24/02/2024 - Gogec
It was a great pleasure to give a talk at the Gogec meeting. It's one of
my favourite synbio endeavours, the organisers are fantastic and I'm
always excited to see what the students come up with.
08/02/2024 - Scheduled fun!
We had a great time with a pot-luck and playing games. My proudest moment was obviously winning at Mahjong.
31/01/2024 - "Visiting" UCL ISMB
I was invited to give a talk to one of our sister departments, Structurla and Molecular Biology.
It was wonderful to properly meet some of the people working across the road from us and share our research.
24/01/2024 - Lucia Marucci visits
We welcomed Prof. Lucia Marucci from Unviersity of Bristol to give a
talk to the IPLS about her work on whole cell models.
04/01/2024 - Welcome Paul!
We welcome Paul Goodman to the group to work on his MRes Synthetic Biology dissertation.
He will be working on minimising the innate interactions between our E. coli chassis and their environment.
01/12/2023 - New pre-print
Sara from Sandrine Geranton's group
has a new pre-print on bioRxiv, looking at effects of joint pain on
behaviour in mice.
05/11/2023 - Xmas lunch
We had a joint Christmas lunch the Barnes group this year. It was great
to unwind a bit with everyone and to celebrate the end of an exciting
year.
29/11/2023 - MathBio meeting
I gave a talk at the MathBio series organised by Philip Pierce. It was
the first time in a long time that I could go into detail about our
modelling approaches and get feedback from a group of mathematicians.
15/11/2023 - IPLS meetup
I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk at the UCL
Institute for the Physics of Living Systems
meetup. I'm incrementaly getting better a presenting the spatial computing work.
08/11/2023 - Synthetic Biology UK
We all went to Bristol for this year's SBUK conference. It has always
been one of my favourite conferences, and is a lovely opportunity to
catch up with friends and colleagues in the field. I had the
opportunity to present the work that we recently finished up in Chris
Barnes' group on
spatial computing.
23/10/2023 - New pre-print
Chris Barnes' group
has a new pre-print on bioRxiv, that I helped with, detailing our
work targeting pathegenic bacteria. We created a new platform for the
delivery of antimicrobial peptides using engineered bacteria.
02/10/2023 - Welcome Renlong, Mod and Griffin!
We are very lucky to have three new students join the group for their
final year dissertation projects.
25/09/2023 - Welcome Casey and Louie!
Welcome Casey Chen and Louie Destouches! It's really starting to feel
like a research group now. I'm very excited to see what we can all
achieve together.
22/09/2023 - CDB "Away" Day
I helped to organise the department away day. We held it in a lovely
space in the art nouveau Mary Ward House. As a relative newbie in the
department, it was great to have the opportunity to meet everyone, put
some names to faces, and have some fun.
11/09/2023 - Leuven Summer School
I was in Leuven to give a talk to students on a summer school for
Design and Control of Microbial Communities. It was a fantastic few
days, arranged by Didier Gonze, Karoline Faust and Leo Lahti.
24/07/2023 - Welcome Alice Cook!
Welcome Alice Cook as the first PhD student in the group. She will be
working on self-organising cellular communities in collaboration with
Katie Bentley
at the Francis Crick Institute.
12/07/2023 - Synbio Africa 2.0
I was honored to be invited to present at the Synbio Africa
conference in Kampala, Uganda. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet
many new researchers and hear about challenges that are unique to
biological engineering in Africa.
07/07/2023 - New pre-print
We have a new pre-print on bioRxiv detailing our work with
Chris Barnes' group
on spatial computing. We developed a new digital computation
platform using gradients of diffusible molecules that are interpreted
by simply engineered E. coli.
05/06/2023 - Manchester Microbiome Modelling Workshop
I had a great time at the Microbiome Modelling Workshop orgainsed by
Eriko Takano
at Manchester University. Two days learning alot about soil and human
microbiomes, genome scale and dynamic modelling, and a whole host of
other things. The conference dinner was at the newly refurbished
Manchester Museum - with a whale skeleton suspended above the dining
tables.
09/03/2023 - Visiting the Ledesma-Amaro Group
I was very priveleged to be invited to give a talk to
Rodrigo's group
at Imperial College London. Their work in the area of microbial
communities is excellent, and it was wonderful to have some time to
talk science at seek his advice.
24/02/2023 - Visiting the Biocompute Lab
I had a fantastic day visiting Tom Gorochowski and the
Biocompute Lab at Bristol University.
It was great to find out what everyone was working on and to share some
of our latest work.
15/02/2023 - What is the key challenge in engineering microbiomes?
I was asked to contribute a piece to a Cell Systems collection of opinions on
the key challenges in engineering microbiomes.
There are some fascinating ideas in there and it is a real privelage to be included
alongside some incredible scientists.
20/01/2023 - Otim Geoffrey from SynBio Africa
I had a great time chatting to Otim about all of his work with
SynBio Africa.
It certainly seems like there's a lot to be excited about. But I don't know
where he finds all of his energy!
18/01/2023 - Future food and drink
I attended a fantastic workshop organised by
Miao Guo to
discuss future innovations in food production with researchers from
King's College London and the food industry.
03/01/2023 - Funded PhD positions available
I have two EPSRC funded PhD positions available to start in Autumn 2023.
The first project is working with
Chris Barnes
to produce a new
platform for the assembly of microbial communities. The second project
is working with
Mike Sulu
to understand the limits of using microbial
communities in future bio-industrial applications.
01/01/2023 - Hello world!
Today is the day I start my own research group!
