Biotechnology has emerged as a modern industrial technology that promises to create new processes for the sustainable manufacture of every-day products in a way that is no longer so destructive to the environment.
Within this field, engineered microorganisms can be genetically programmed to valorise sustainable carbon feedstocks into high-value industrial products using modern synthetic biology methods. Here, primary and secondary metabolic pathways from diverse bacteria, plants and mammals can be combined in a single microorganism to enable the bio-production of chemicals that would otherwise be manufactured via multi-step synthesis from diminishing fossil fuels.
This can include the upcycling of ‘waste’ feedstocks to create a circular bioeconomy, simultaneously decoupling existing industrial processes from petrochemicals whilst also rediverting low-value materials from landfill and/or incineration.
In recent years, our lab and others have demonstrated the bio-upcycling of waste lignin and PET plastic to produce the industrial chemicals adipic acid and vanillin. In this PhD project, we will collaborate with a flavours & fragrances company to develop the first bioproduction of a high-value fragrance molecule from an abundant food waste source in the UK.
Overall, this project offers a unique opportunity to lead the development of a novel bioprocess to generate high value compounds from low value waste to fuel the circular bioeconomy in the UK.
This highly multidisciplinary doctoral project will be based in the Wallace Lab at the University of Edinburgh (http://wallacelab.bio.ed.ac.uk), a friendly and inclusive research team based at the Institute of Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology (IQB3) in the School of Biological Sciences and the Centre for Engineering Biology (https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology/centre-engineering-biology; @EdEngBio). The lab offers a unique training environment for PhD students to gain experience in a broad range of synthetic biology and chemical laboratory techniques – including metabolic pathway design, bioinformatics, DNA assembly, microbiology and protein biochemistry; in addition to organic synthesis, chemical biology and the analysis of microbial metabolites by HPLC, GC, 1D/2D NMR and LC-MS.
To Apply
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More Information
Website: http://wallacelab.bio.ed.ac.uk
Twitter: @Wallace_Lab, @Dr_StephenW, @EdEngBio, @SBSatEd
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