Research

In my current research, I look at how the spatial location of genetic information plays a role in single-cell system dynamics. It is seen that increasing the distance of two parts of a simple pathway can drastically affect its dynamics. When I think of spatial organisation of the transcribed components, especially small proteins, it seems to me that diffusion on the scale of an E.Coli would cause this organisation to be a short transient process. This would lead to the conclusion that spatial organisation effects are not significant over a protein lifetime. These conflicting observations attracted me to find what is causing this dissonance of this initial model and experiment. We hope that understanding this effect allows us to predict the dynamics of synthetic biology designs more accurately, and save some of the labour intensive and time consuming trial and error. This is not only time consuming but also writes off genetic cassettes as "not working" while slight spatial adaption might provide a cure, this results in a small library of accepted "working" gene design components.

Publications

• ACS synthetic biology: A model for the spatio-temporal design of gene regulatory circuits