Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London

Engineering biosynthesis

We engineer biosynthetic pathways and cell-free systems to discover and make new medicines, antimicrobials and sustainable chemicals.

Explore our research Meet the team

High-yield and low-cost cell-free protein synthesis
Non-model bacteria
From DNA to purified compound
CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering

What we do

We engineer the biology that makes useful molecules

Bacteria make thousands of chemicals that become medicines, crop protection agents and industrial chemicals. Most of the genes behind these chemicals stay silent in the laboratory. We switch on the pathways, find out what they make and engineer them to make more. Our work covers new enzymes, silent biosynthetic gene clusters and the design of gene expression systems.

We also build cell-free systems. A cell-free system is a cell extract that makes proteins in a test tube, with no living cells. Ours reach up to 4 mg/mL of peptide or protein and run on automated platforms, so we use them to make peptides, proteins and small molecules and to prototype pathways for infectious disease and agriculture.

Antimicrobial resistance is a major global health threat. A 2024 analysis in The Lancet estimated 1.14 million deaths directly attributable to resistant bacterial infections in 2021. With the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), in a BBSRC-funded project, we use cell-free systems to measure resistance and to develop alternative antimicrobials.

We co-organise the London Cell-free Biological Products Network. It holds two meetings a year, mainly for early career researchers to present alongside an invited external speaker, and each meeting draws 30 to 50 participants from industry and academia.

Diagram of our approach: microbial cells and a bottle of orange culture lead, through cell-free gene expression in a tube, to peptides, proteins and small molecules, shown as a red solution in a tube.

Research

Research themes

Each theme has its own page with figures, data and selected publications.

Figure from the arcyriaflavin F paper: the biosynthetic gene cluster in Streptomyces venezuelae, a plate of Streptomyces coelicolor M1152 colonies, and the structure of arcyriaflavin F.

Theme 1

Synthetic Biology for Natural Products

We engineer Streptomyces bacteria to discover and make new bioactive molecules, from single enzymes to complete pathways.

Figure showing a ribosome binding site library workflow, GFP fluorescence by spacer length, and comparisons of cell-free expression with predicted values.

Theme 2

Cell-free Synthetic Biology

We build high-yielding cell-free systems from diverse bacteria to make peptides, proteins and small molecules, and to prototype pathways fast.

Figure showing a cell-free expression workflow for resistance enzymes, an mScarlet-I time course, and heat maps of enzyme activity across glutamate conditions.

Theme 3

Antimicrobial Resistance and Alternative Antimicrobials

We use cell-free systems to measure how antibiotics work and how bacteria resist them, and to test alternative antimicrobials, with the UK Health Security Agency.

Partners

AIMARIA

We are a partner in AIMARIA, Accelerating Innovation in Marine AI-powered Bioprospecting. This Horizon Europe project is coordinated by NTNU in Norway and led by Professor Rahmi Lale. It joins marine biodiscovery, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and biomanufacturing.