Finding new routes to biofuels is the theme of the Wain Medal Lecture 2015.

The Lecture by Professor David Leys, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, takes place on Wednesday 14 October in the Woolf Lecture Theatre on Canterbury campus from 17.00 to 18.00. The lecture is free and open to all.

One of the main challenges our society faces is the dwindling level of oil reserves. We not only depend upon these for transport fuels, but also plastics, lubricants and a wide range of petrochemicals. Solutions that seek to reduce our dependency on fossil oil are therefore urgently needed. Modern approaches seek to provide an answer through synthetic biology: making organisms produce ‘oil’.

Our group uses state-of-the-art enzymology and structural biology to underpin laboratory evolution techniques aimed at application in synthetic biology. We will present an overview of the present approaches aimed at direct biological production of hydrocarbons, provide an account of some of our own results in this area, and speculate on the scope and limits of synthetic biology applications in this field.

For further information, please contact Dr Ian Blomfield, telephone 01227 823697/
email  I.C.Blomfield@kent.ac.uk