I’ve been involved in Synthetic Biology for better part of the last decade. My PhD work at Newcastle University focused on facilitating bio-electronic interface via engineered pathways as part of a larger collaborative grant to create a bio-robotic hybrid device. My more recent work at the University of Cambridge was on developing a field-use whole-cell Arsenic Biosensor for deployment in South Asia (www.arsenicbiosensor.org).

I’m relatively new at working with plants and the opportunity to reengineer the Marchantia polymorpha plastid as part of the Open Plant initiative is a great point of transition into this sphere. The main focus of my contribution to Open Plant is to reconstruct the entire 121kb plastid genome in a way that makes it easier to manipulate, facilitating future work on plastid transformation in M. polymorpha and, in time, other plants. I am also working together with Haydn King from the Ajioka Lab on creating a codon optimised reporter toolkit for use in the M. polymorpha plastid, consisting of a 13 fluorescent reporters across a wide spectrum ranging from near UV to near infrared. The codon optimisation platform should also become a useful tool for future work on plastid manipulation, in Marchantia and beyond.

I worked with Jim Ajioka and Jonathan Openshaw on a science/arts collaborative project that came to be known as Syn City. The idea was to create dynamic, living sculptures using modified E. coli such that all the “paint” was living. Jonathan designed 3D printed structures of which we made moulds to cast Agar with an integrated 3D printed mesh skeleton. The modified bacteria could then be deposited on the structure, which developed colour over time. www.syncity.co.uk.