Publications

Dr Eftychios Frangedakis and his colleagues in the Dept. Plant Sciences have developed the OpenPlant Kit, a series of resources and techniques that simplifies genetic engineering in plants. These tools can be used for applications such as crop development and bioproduction in plants.

Hoping to improve our understanding of cell-to-cell communications, Dr Roser Vento-Tormo and her team have developed CellPhoneDB. This an open database of ligand-receptor-interactions and an accompanying analysis tool to help identify interactions in single-cell RNAseq data.

Precision agriculture can provide farmers with valuable information about their crops and help improve yields. Researchers Antonio Ruiz Gonzales and Prof. Jim Haseloff are developing a low-cost open-source pH sensor to help directly monitor stress in plants.

Hoping to improve the time consuming process of manually annotating patient’s radiotherapy scans, Dr Rajesh Jena and Microsoft Research used artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop OSAIRIS, one of the first pieces of open source software to be clinically approved and deployed as a medical device.

Isoprenoids are an attractive class of metabolites for enzymatic synthesis from renewable substrates. However, metabolic engineering of microorganisms for monoterpenoid production is limited by the need for time-consuming, and often non-intuitive, combinatorial tuning of biosynthetic pathway variations to meet design criteria. Towards alleviating this limitation, the goal of this work was to build a modular, cell-free platform for construction and testing of monoterpenoid pathways, using the fragrance and flavoring molecule limonene as a model.

Dr Jennifer Deegan has built a Focus Stacking system that enables her to take close up, high-definition photos of very small gametophyte ferns. The project was further developed through an OpenPlant Fund and the Biomaker Challenge, during which she collaborated with an interdisciplinary team to photograph new samples and build up teaching tools to enable others to replicate the system.

Scientists at the John Innes Centre, Earlham Institute, and Quadram Institute in Norwich and the University of Queensland have improved the technique, known as speed breeding, adapting it to work in vast glasshouses and in scaled-down desktop growth chambers.

First author Christian Boehm, who earned his PhD in the Haseloff Lab and is the founder of the European Association of Synthetic Biology Students and Postdocs, reflects on the significance of this latest publication.

As part of a collaboration between the University of Cambridge the Universidad Catolica de Chile, Pollak and Federici have devised a new method for gene assembly based on two Type IIS restriction endonuceases, Bsal and Sapl. Loop Assembly allows rapid and efficient production of large DNA constructs, is compatible with widely used Level zero (L0) DNA parts such as Phytobricks, and can be easily automated.

A two-in-one solar bio-battery and solar panel has been created by researchers who printed living cyanobacteria and circuitry onto paper.