高清福利片 determines how to harness the power of microbial metabolism. We focus on the biosynthesis of complex natural products such as antibiotics and strategies for bioengineering. This research involves both characterisation of the biosynthetic enzymes as well as bioengineering new natural product pathways and developing new genome engineering tools.
Microbial metabolism results in a wealth of molecular diversity, much of which is used to discover novel therapeutics. We apply modern synthetic biology to create new molecular scaffolds.
Our aims are to use a variety of synthetic biology techniques to discover and engineer new biosynthetic pathways. Current directions focus on heterologous expression, cloning of biosynthetic gene clusters, cell free biosynthesis, and mechanistic enzymology.
We have a variety of projects focusing on gene cluster cloning, heterologous expression of clusters found on Australian soil, and developing new ways to genetically manipulate environmental bacteria.
Cell free expression is a valuable way to circumvent bottlenecks that are introduced via lengthy genetic procedures. Efforts to further optimise and develop these systems include optimising for specific classes of natural products (e.g. polyketides or non-ribosomal peptides) or new host machineries. We are particularly interested in developing cell free systems for natural product production in聽Streptomyces听补苍诲听Myxobacteria. This has applications in high throughput bioengineering. For example, screening constructs in collaboration with computational scientists employing machine learning.
Heterologous expression is a powerful tool for accessing engineered pathways as well as pathways that are cryptic鈥攐r not produced under standard culture conditions.聽 Efforts in our lab aim to improve heterologous expression of natural products鈥攂oth through developing better expression tools and through engineering new pathways.
We seek to characterise the enzymes in biosynthetic pathways. Our biggest focus is on the so called 鈥渕egasynthase鈥 enzymes, which are type I polyketide synthases and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases. These are complex, multidomain enzymes that have 鈥渃olinear鈥 biosynthetic pathways where in the molecular structure of metabolites correlates to sequence, enabling the ability to 鈥済enome mine鈥 new natural products and recombine biosynthetic elements via protein chimeras.聽 Additionally, we characterise enzymes that are mechanistically novel or distinct.
The Bailey Group is supported by its leadership, students and volunteers who are committed to researching how to harness the power of microbial metabolism.
For information about our research and opportunities to work or collaborate with us, please contact聽constance.bailey@sydney.edu.au.
