Imperial College London
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Tom Ellis

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Bioengineering

Professor of Synthetic Genome Engineering
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 7615t.ellis Website CV

 
 
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Location

 

704Bessemer BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Gowers:2019:10.1021/acssynbio.9b00243,
author = {Gowers, G-OF and Cameron, SJS and Perdones-Montero, A and Bell, D and Chee, SM and Kern, M and Tew, D and Ellis, T and Takats, Z},
doi = {10.1021/acssynbio.9b00243},
journal = {ACS Synthetic Biology},
pages = {2566--2575},
title = {Off-colony screening of biosynthetic libraries by rapid laser-enabled mass spectrometry},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.9b00243},
volume = {8},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Leveraging advances in DNA synthesis and molecular cloning techniques, synthetic biology increasingly makes use of large construct libraries to explore large design spaces. For biosynthetic pathway engineering the ability to screen these libraries for a variety of metabolites of interest is essential. If the metabolite of interest or the metabolic phenotype is not easily measurable, screening soon becomes a major bottleneck involving time-consuming culturing, sample preparation, and extraction. To address this, we demonstrate the use of automated Laser-Assisted Rapid Evaporative Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (LA-REIMS) - a form of ambient laser desorption ionisation mass spectrometry - to perform rapid mass spectrometry analysis direct from agar plate yeast colonies without sample preparation or extraction. We use LA-REIMS to assess production levels of violacein and betulinic acid directly from yeast colonies at a rate of 6 colonies per minute. We then demonstrate the throughput enabled by LA-REIMS by screening over 450 yeast colonies in under 4 hours, while simultaneously generating recoverable glycerol stocks of each colony in real-time. This showcases LA-REIMS as a pre-screening tool to complement downstream quantification methods such as LCMS. Through pre-screening several hundred colonies with LA-REIMS, we successfully isolate and verify a strain with a 2.5-fold improvement in betulinic acid production. Finally, we show that LA-REIMS can detect 20 out of a panel of 27 diverse biological molecules, demonstrating the broad applicability of LA-REIMS to metabolite detection. The rapid and automated nature of LA-REIMS makes this a valuable new technology to complement existing screening technologies currently employed in academic and industrial workflows.
AU  - Gowers,G-OF
AU  - Cameron,SJS
AU  - Perdones-Montero,A
AU  - Bell,D
AU  - Chee,SM
AU  - Kern,M
AU  - Tew,D
AU  - Ellis,T
AU  - Takats,Z
DO  - 10.1021/acssynbio.9b00243
EP  - 2575
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 2161-5063
SP  - 2566
TI  - Off-colony screening of biosynthetic libraries by rapid laser-enabled mass spectrometry
T2  - ACS Synthetic Biology
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.9b00243
UR  - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31622554
UR  - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.9b00243
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/74295
VL  - 8
ER  -
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