Wednesday, 22 November 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 4

Speaker: Dr Constance Bailey, School of Chemistry

Title: Engineering Microbial Biosynthesis through Synthetic Biology: Tools and Applications

Abstract: Research in the Bailey lab is broadly focused on engineering natural product biosynthetic pathways from the microbial secondary metabolism through complex biosynthetic pathways with programmable biosynthetic logic such as polyketide synthases (PKSs), non-ribsomal peptide synthases (NRPSs), and ribsomally incorporated post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs). Efforts have focused on tool development, such as strategies to improve heterologous expression with simple pigment reporters.  This allows for profiling new host machineries, characterising biosynthetic enzymes and regulatory parts, and ultimately designing pathways for new natural product analogs. Since starting at University of Sydney, new directions in the Bailey lab have started research exploring exciting new prospects towards applying synthetic biology to generate important leads for antimicrobial development, focusing on targets of the cell surface of pathogens.  The synergy of pathway manipulation and host engineering is essential to generate a broad range of important bioproducts including therapeutic candidates.

Bio: Dr Constance Bailey is a Senior Lecturer and group leader in the School of Chemistry. She completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin investigating the enzymology and biocatalytic applications of polyketide synthases and pursued a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute where she investigated bioengineering and synthetic biology applications of polyketide synthases to generate bioproducts. Prior to starting at the University of Sydney, she was an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.  Her research group uses a combination of biochemistry and synthetic biology to better understand how to engineer complex biosynthetic assembly lines such as polyketide synthases and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases.