EngBio ECRs Meet, Greet and Talk

Monday 22 January 12pm - 1pm.
Postdoc Centre, 16 Mill Lane Basement.

Monthly meeting of the University of Cambridge EngBio Postdoc & Postgrad Groups. Open to postdocs, students and research staff from across the University and affiliated institutes (MRC-LMB, Babraham Institute, Wellcome Sanger Institute).

This month's talks:

“A microfluidics-enabled workflow for rapid large-scale sequence-function mapping informs biocatalyst engineering” Maximilian Gantz, Hollfelder Lab, Department of Biochemistry.
“Maximilian Gantz studied Biochemistry at TU Munich. After a stay at Donald Hilvert’s laboratory at ETH Zurich to work on engineering nonribosomal peptide synthetases he worked on site-specific protein labeling using unnatural amino acids and transpeptidases in the laboratory of Kathrin Lang. In 2020 he joined Florian Hollfelder’s group at the University of Cambridge for PhD studies funded by a Trinity College Benn W Levy studentship. His PhD is focused on developing novel methodologies on the interface of droplet microfluidics and deep sequencing to study the sequence-function relationship of enzymes at a large scale.”

"Curing plasmids for restoring antibiotic sensitivity in vivo" Alma Wu, Dept. Engineering (Bakshi Lab)
Antibiotic resistance genes in Gram-negative bacteria are most commonly carried on large, conjugative plasmids. Once mobilised on these plasmids, resistance genes can be stably maintained in a population even in the absence of selection due to the presence of toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems on the plasmids. Furthermore, bacterial conjugation allows these resistance plasmids to be easily spread throughout populations and across species. Being able to eliminate target resistance plasmids from a population would restore sensitivity to a particular antibiotic in patients, regardless of the strain or species of the host cell. Here we present the design and validation of such curing plasmids, using intrinsic properties of plasmids such as their Inc type, TA systems and conjugation to target and eliminate specific resistance plasmids, while leaving the remainder of the population untouched.

Join our monthly meets to meet fellow Early Career Researchers from across the University interested in biology, engineering, design, computer science, bioethics and more. This is a great opportunity to meet ECRs from other schools and departments, share knowledge and ideas, establish connections and collaborations, and find out more about EngBio activities such as funding calls and support.
Each session will host 1-2 lightening talks from ECRs covering research, tools & technologies, and fields & applications of synthetic and engineering biology. This will be followed by informal discussion (and free food and drink!).

**Please RSVP as below.. Any problems with RSVP, please email vr314@cam.ac.uk**