Research

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Synthetic Biology underpins advances in the bioeconomy

Biological systems - including the simplest cells - exhibit a broad range of functions to thrive in their environment. Research in the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology is focused on the possibility of engineering the underlying biochemical processes to solve many of the challenges facing society, from healthcare to sustainable energy. In particular, we model, analyse, design and build biological and biochemical systems in living cells and/or in cell extracts, both exploring and enhancing the engineering potential of biology. 

As part of our research we develop novel methods to accelerate the celebrated Design-Build-Test-Learn synthetic biology cycle. As such research in the Centre for Synthetic Biology highly multi- and interdisciplinary covering computational modelling and machine learning approaches; automated platform development and genetic circuit engineering ; multi-cellular and multi-organismal interactions, including gene drive and genome engineering; metabolic engineering; in vitro/cell-free synthetic biology; engineered phages and directed evolution; and biomimetics, biomaterials and biological engineering.

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Scholes:2019:10.1016/j.cels.2019.07.007,
author = {Scholes, N and Schnoerr, D and Isalan, M and Stumpf, M},
doi = {10.1016/j.cels.2019.07.007},
journal = {Cell Systems},
pages = {243--257.e4},
title = {A comprehensive network atlas reveals that Turing patterns are common but not robust},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2019.07.007},
volume = {9},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Turing patterns (TPs) underlie many fundamental developmental processes, but they operate over narrow parameter ranges, raising the conundrum of how evolution can ever discover them. Here we explore TP design space to address this question and to distill design rules. We exhaustively analyze 2- and 3-node biological candidate Turing systems, amounting to 7,625 networks and more than 3 × 10^11 analyzed scenarios. We find that network structure alone neither implies nor guarantees emergent TPs. A large fraction (>61%) of network design space can produce TPs, but these are sensitive to even subtle changes in parameters, network structure, and regulatory mechanisms. This implies that TP networks are more common than previously thought, and evolution might regularly encounter prototypic solutions. We deduce compositional rules for TP systems that are almost necessary and sufficient (96% of TP networks contain them, and 92% of networks implementing them produce TPs). This comprehensive network atlas provides the blueprints for identifying natural TPs and for engineering synthetic systems.
AU  - Scholes,N
AU  - Schnoerr,D
AU  - Isalan,M
AU  - Stumpf,M
DO  - 10.1016/j.cels.2019.07.007
EP  - 257
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 2405-4712
SP  - 243
TI  - A comprehensive network atlas reveals that Turing patterns are common but not robust
T2  - Cell Systems
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2019.07.007
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/70533
VL  - 9
ER  -
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