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Engineering Biology in Cambridge

 

PhD studentships on offer in Cambridge and selected opportunities from elsewhere will be advertised here. You are also welcome to browse the research directory and contact potential supervisors directly.

Latest Studentship Opportunities

Synthetic biology aims at engineering bio-computing devices in living organisms. Key to this endeavour is the computer-aided design of biological systems, which is not yet robust enough to design fully predictable genetic circuits. To this end, we need standards. Foremost among emerging computing standards is the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL), an open standard for the representation of in silico biological designs.

This PhD project will focus on the research and development of novel design methods for synthetic biology based on SBOL. SBOL is being developed by an international community, for which the supervisors are Editor and Chair. This standard provides a data format that can capture information of complex systems in unprecedented level of detail, leading to the potential automation of synthetic biology workflows.

Applications are now open for the 2019 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Summer Course in Synthetic Biology. This course focuses on how the complexity of biological systems can be combined with traditional engineering approaches to result in new design principles for synthetic biology. The centerpiece of the course is an immersive laboratory experience in which students work in teams to learn the practical and theoretical underpinnings of synthetic biology research. Broadly, the course explores how cellular regulation (transcriptional, translational, post-translational, and epigenetic) can be used to engineer cells that accomplish well-defined goals.

Plants have the ability to alter their growth and development in response to changes in their environment. They do this by altering the expression levels of large suites of genes. Previous work has shown that a small network of genes may be responsible for coordinating large-scale changes in gene expression in response to the detection of pathogens. To develop crops with the ability to deliver high yields in changing environments, we need to advance our understanding of how these networks function and how variations in sequences of the key genes that coordinate these networks affect plant responses. This project will investigate the role of candidate key controllers in a pathogen-response network, using a novel approach of designing synthetic genetic controllers to rewire the network. Our aims are to understand how the network is coordinated and to provide insights into how to breed or rationally engineer plants resilient to stress. The student will be based in the Patron Lab (Earlham Institute, Norwich) and will work in close collaboration with the Denby Lab (University of York) and the Morris Lab (John Innes Centre, Norwich). This exciting, collaborative and multidisciplinary project will employ a range of techniques including molecular plant biology, synthetic biology, genome engineering, systems biology and modelling. It would be suitable for a biologist with, or eager to acquire, computational skills. Training will be provided in all areas.

Climate change due to anthropogenic deterioration of the environment is a major threat to the biosphere. One way to address this problem comes from bioremediation through synthetic biology. This project aims to abstract ecosystems into sets of compounds, reactions and connections. Such ecological templates will then be mathematically formalised, and experimentally reproduced, to allow their integration into the rational design of genetic circuits

Taxol (paclitaxel) is one of the most important anticancer drugs and applications are encouraged for a PhD Studentship in microbial synthetic biology, focusing on the development of novel cell factories for the efficient and environmentally sustainable production paclitaxel, to help meet increasing demand for this key pharmaceutical.

Sharing designs for lab instruments as “open source hardware” could bring about a step change in science and medicine, by making high quality instruments more widely available and easier to customise or automate. This is an opportunity for a talented student with a background in Physics, Engineering, or a related discipline, to study for a PhD aligned with the "Open Lab Instrumentation" project that includes the Universities of Bath and Cambridge as well as our partners STICLab in Tanzania.

The Synthetic Biology Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) is a collaboration between the Universities of Bristol, Oxford and Warwick. It offers a four-year training programme leading to a PhD. The programme is designed for students with both physical and life sciences backgrounds.

PhD available with Dr Nicola Patron of the Earlham Institute on design principles for synthetic gene regulation - understanding how cis-regulatory functions are encoded in plant DNA.

The EPSRC and BBSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Synthetic Biology (SynBioCDT) is a doctoral training programme that combines the fundamental understanding of biological systems with the principles of engineering, so as to create the next generation of industrial and academic leaders in the nascent field of Synthetic Biology.

This PhD project with Dr Frank Tietze at the Institute for Manufacturing will be focused on a recent phenomenon that can be labelled “OpenIP”, for instance where large IP owners strategically make IP freely available through patent pledges. These seem to be carefully designed by the companies for different reasons and with a number of restrictions on licensees, such as non-assertion clauses.

A four-year PhD studentship is available in Anne Osbourne's lab at the John Innes Centre, Norwich entitled 'Directing biosynthesis of bioactive triterpenes for pharmaceutical applications'

Three fully-funded, four-year PhD studentships are available from the University of Cambridge in association with OpenPlant, a UK Synthetic Biology Research Centre creating open technologies for plant synthetic biology.

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship that forms part of a multidisciplinary, multicentre project "Algal oils by design", which aims to establish microalgae as an industrial biotechnology platform for the production of high value lipids, such as omega-3 fatty acids.

The UK-France joint PhD programme aims to develop research in key areas of mutual interest to France and the UK, including areas of synthetic biology. Expressions of interest for the programme should be submitted by Friday 4 March 2016.

Loughborough University is inviting applications for a PhD studentship in ‘Development of a small scale automated bioreactor platform for AMR product optimisation using a synthetic biology approach’.