News

  • We are hiring! We are looking for an exceptionally motivated and talented postdoctoral researcher to join our team, initially for one year (March 2025-March 2026). They will work on the bottom-up and rational enhancement of PURE using protein enhancers and synthetic metabolism. Please get in touch for more information if you are interested, view the advert here, and apply before 6 January 2025.

  • 28 November 2024 » We had a great time at Synthetic Biology UK, catching up with old friends and colleagues as well as meeting many new people. Well done to Aarushi for her great poster, and congratulations to Ella for her amazing talk (which also won the best presentation award)!

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  • 9 September 2024 » Surendra's preprint is now out on Biorxiv! Please find it here: ATP regeneration from pyruvate in the PURE system. Many congratulations for the stellar work throughout his PhD.

  • 24 August 2024 » Our review paper on Applications of cell free protein synthesis in protein design is now published. Congratulations to Ella, Sara, and Michael who have contributed to this, and collaborators Chris W. Wood and Lynne Regan who led the study.

  • 13 May 2024 » We welcome Sanika to the lab to start her MSc project with us, on investigating alternative ATP regeneration pathways in PURE, and at the same time say goodbye to Ryan who goes back to Toronto, and Paula who has finished her degree.

  • 18 Apr 2024 » Congratulations to Surendra who just presented his PhD work at the SynCell 2024 conference in Toulouse, France.

  • 14 Apr 2024 » Michael's preprint on applying machine learning to study physiochemical properties of natural and engineered proteins is now out on bioRxiv. A great collaboration with the Oyarzún and Wells Wood groups!

  • 15 Jan 2024 » We welcome Ryan Lee, visiting PhD student from the Chou lab in Toronto, and Paula Juve, undergraduate honours student, who are both starting their projects in the lab today.

  • 23 Aug 2023 » Nadanai has just returned from the BioGate competition, impressively hosted by students at the Istanbul Technical University.

  • 21 Aug 2023 » Big congratulations to Junming and Matthew for finishing their MSc and Hons projects respectively. We enjoyed working with them and wish them all the best for their future careers.

  • 29 May 2023 » Another warm welcome to Matthew Hardcastle, who will join the lab to work on acid-stressed cell-free systems for his honours project.

  • 1 May 2023 » We welcome Junming Li to start her MSc in our lab, continuing on Dev's excellent work involving encapsulated enzymes in cell-free systems.

  • 22 April 2023 » We had fine weather for our group hike at the Hermitage in Dunkeld:

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  • 21 March 2023 » Nadanai gives a talk at the Engineering Life conference at MIAPbP in Munich. It was a very interesting workshop, with plenty of discussions about the big questions in synthetic biology!

  • 16 January 2023 » We welcome Dev Vaidya to our lab to begin an honours project investigating cell-free enzyme encapsulation, as well as Aarushi Ruhela, a PhD student co-supervised with Jamie Marland in the School of Engineering, who will study electronic interfaces to cell-free reactions.

  • 3 October 2022 » At the start of a new academic year, we say goodbye to Paula after a very successful summer project. We welcome Christoph Wagner, a new PhD student co-supervised with Andrea Weisse's group, who will be working on regenerating cell-free systems. And we congratulate Sahan on publishing his paper on phage engineering in cell-free. Lots of good news all around!

  • 7 July 2022 » Congratulations to Sarah who has published a paper, in collaboration with Ella Thornton, Zoe Gidden, Mathew Horrocks, and Lynne Regan, on a new surface immobilisation technique for cell-free synthesised proteins. Read it here!

  • 4 July 2022 » Our second FLF postdoc, Sahan Liyanagedera, has just started; he'll be working on high-throughput screens of purified cell-free reactions in collaboration with the Edinburgh Genome Foundry. Read more about him here.

  • 28 June 2022 » Nadanai gave an interview for BioPOD, the School of Biological Sciences podcast, where he discusses his background, how he became interested in synthetic biology, and his current research in cell-free systems. You can listen to the episode here.

  • 20 June 2022 » We welcome Paula Paredes Vergara, an undergraduate student from Glasgow University, who starts a summer internship in our group to work on assembly methods to construct DNA templates for CFPS reactions.

  • 19 May 2022 » Nadanai gives a talk together with Jane Alexander at the Galvanised seminar series, organised by the Edinburgh Futures Institute. We discuss our Biopolis collaboration and our shared interests in the creative process in science and art. We had a great dicsussion with a very engaged audience. Thank you for the opportunity!

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  • 21 April 2022 » Our first FLF postdoc, Tony Bougas, starts. He will be working on metabolomics of cell-free reactions. You can find out more about him here.

  • 13 May 2022 » We say goodbye to Yan Ting, Tim, Katie, and Dominik, who have successfully completed their rotations. We wish them all the best for their future careers.

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  • 6 March 2022 » Nadanai gives a talk at the 4th International Yeditepe University Genetics and Bioengineering Student Congress - sadly online, otherwise it would have been a great trip to Istanbul. Many thanks for the invitation!

  • 4 March 2022 » Our new Opentrons arrives. Cue some very excited PhD students.

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  • 14 February 2022 » We welcome Katie Bexley to a rotation project in our lab. Katie is a student on the Wellcome Integrative Cell Mechanisms PhD programme, and she will be learning about microfluidics as well as working with our new microarraying robot, nicknamed `Gus'.

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  • 24 January 2022 » We have two undergraduate Honours students joining us this term, Yan Ting Hee and Tim Bosse, to work on cell-free protein expression. We are very excited to welcome them into the lab for the first undergraduate wet-lab projects in two years!

  • 21 January 2022 » A very warm welcome to Sarah Paterson, who has just finished her first week with us. She is a new PhD student working on a Leverhulme-funded project to carry out protein engineering using cell-free systems and microfluidics. Read more about her here.

  • 14 September 2021 » We are advertising two postdoc positions as part of our new UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship programme. One is in machine learning and high-throughput screening, and the other is in synthetic metabolism, both applied to cell-free reactions. Full details and links to apply here. Please circulate widely!

  • 8 September 2021 » We are thrilled to announce that Nadanai has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. This £1.5M, 4-year grant will help us kick-start our research into regenerative cell-free systems, and we are very excited to advertise two new postdoctoral positions to work on this project. Read more about the opportunities here. The news has been featured on the university as well as school webpages.

  • 30 August 2021 » We say congratulations and goodbye to Meijie who will be returning to China after successfully completing her MSc project.

  • 21 July 2021 » Our microfluidics setup is ready to go, and we are now advertising a Leverhulme Trust funded PhD project to bring it to fruition. Please see the project description for more details.

  • 21 June 2021 » Summer is here, and with it a change of personnel and activities. We say goodbye to Sasirasa and Bastien, and welcome Dominik, who has been awarded an EPSRC undergraduate vacation internship to work with us for the next couple of months.

  • 10 May 2021 » We welcome Meijie who is joining us as a new MSc student this summer. Read all about her here.

  • 15 Mar 2021 » A new studentship has just been advertised as part of the IBioIC CTP programme, between ours and Chris French's lab, and in collaboration with the Scotch Whisky Research Institute. The aim is to develop cell-free biosensors to monitor whisky quality. Funding is available for UK or EU students resident in the UK for 3 years prior to start of studentship. More info and apply here by the deadline of 9th April 2021.

  • 11 Mar 2021 » Nadanai is back at SynthSys to present at the Open Centre Meeting, on self-regeneration in cell-free systems.

  • 8 Feb 2021 » We are very excited to be supporting the new International Directed Evolution Competition (IDEC), which aims to harness irrational design to complement existing rational design efforts for engineering biology. Find out more information, and how you can take part, at their website.

  • 11 Jan 2021 » Happy new year everyone! Delighted to welcome two new starts to the lab: Surendra Yadav, a new PhD student who is joining us from India, and Bastien Mollet, a visiting Masters student from France. Have a look at their biographies on the People section.

  • 11 Dec 2020 » Our self-regeneration paper is finally published, in time for the holidays. Great collaboration with Barbora Lavickova and Sebastian Maerkl at LBNC:

  • 28 Oct 2020 » Thank you for the opportunity to present a keynote at CINBI 2020!

  • 6 Oct 2020 » A very warm welcome to our first PhD student Alex Perkins. Read more about him in the People section.

  • 1 Oct 2020 » Construction is underway for our first microscope and microfluidics setup.

  • 24 Aug 2020 » Congratulations to Ying, Yehezkiel, and Yutong for completing their MSc dissertations.

  • 3 Aug 2020 » We are recruiting! We have a 4-year fully-funded EASTBIO PhD position available for a project entitled 'Scalable cell-free manufacturing of diverse therapeutic proteins'. The project aims to develop strategies to produce important therapeutic proteins at the industrial scale, and will be in close collaboration with Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies. This position is open to UK as well as EU students already resident in the UK for 3 years. More information can be found here. You can apply directly on the graduate school website here. The deadline is 24th August.

  • 24 Jul 2020 » A second publication for this summer is out: this time, Nadanai's short perspectives piece on rational biodesign with cell-free systems.

  • 4 Jul 2020 » We just published a new preprint on self-regenerating cell-free systems, in collaboration with LBNC.

  • 25 May 2020 » Many congratulations to Maria and Baird for completing their Honours projects!

  • 18 May 2020 » We welcome Ying, Yehezkiel, and Yutong, who are joining for their MSci projects, which at this time are all remotely-supervised computational studies. Read their profiles in the People section.

  • 24 Apr 2020 » Nadanai will be giving a talk at the 22nd EMBL PhD Symposium in November, post-lockdown hopefully.

  • 24 Mar 2020 » Although our wet lab is closed, we are making good progress with remote work. Our comprehensive review on cell-free, with collaborators from LBNC, has just been published today. We wish everyone all the best during these challenging times!

  • 20 Jan 2020 » A very warm welcome to Maria and Baird, two undergraduates joining the lab for their senior honours projects!

  • 05 Jan 2020 » Thank you to everyone who applied for the PhD projects. We will be in touch shortly.

  • 23 Dec 2019 » Preprint online for our new review of cell-free synbio, just in time for the holidays! Have a great break everyone, and looking forward to the new year.

  • 11 Dec 2019 » It's the end-of-year conference season! Nadanai presented his work at SBUK 2019 in Warwick, and the Cell Free Systems Conference in Boston.

  • 01 Nov 2019 » 3 new PhD projects are now online. Check them out here.

  • 31 Oct 2019 » We've moved into our new lab space in the Roger Land Building!

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  • 26 Sep 2019 » Our new lab website is up and running.

  • 12 Sep 2019 » Nadanai gives a talk at the SynthSys open centre meeting.

  • 10 Sep 2019 » Nadanai presents at the SynBioControl workshop in Oxford.

  • 19 Aug 2019 » Our lab has officially started!