About me

I completed my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Exeter, obtaining a first class degree with honours, completing a project in chemical synthesis of organic compounds.

Subsequently I completed a Masters by Research, also with the University of Exeter, looking into second generation biofuels. This degree was split site, completing the research at Shell’s Biodomain lab in Houston, Texas. This split site approach allowed me to better understand industrial approaches to next generation biofuels, while still achieving research towards my masters. Over the course of my Masters I was interested in experiencing biological research from an academic focus, as well as further developing my lab skills and scientific writing, and therefore applied for a PhD at the University of York.

My project

The metabolism of sugars can be impacted by sub-optimal enzyme rates and the loss of intermediates to side reactions. Increasing substrate channelling is a method of reducing side reactions and potentially increasing rates of reaction. Methods to increase substrate channelling include protein fusions and protein scaffolding, the former describing the forming covalent links between two or more proteins to reduce distance between them, while the latter describes using peptide tags to form non-covalent assemblies. My work aims to increase sugar metabolism by fusing downstream enzymes or scaffolds to membrane transporters of various sugars.

Through developing a Golden Gate-based gene assembly method, I aim to synthesize libraries of protein fusions to study the impact of different soluble partners on the functionality of membrane transporters and the role of the linker sequencing joining them. Moving forward, I aim to focus on ways of producing scaffold assemblies, using fluorescent microscopy techniques, such as Total Internal Reflection Microscopy, to demonstrate membrane localization. Once the scaffold activity in confirmed at the membrane, work will focus on producing a scaffold assembly suitable for localizing downstream sugar metabolism enzymes at the membrane to increase substrate channeling and determine whether this can improve xylose metabolism.

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