News 2021

Awarded in the category ‘applications of research’ The SynPharm part of this was built with funds from the UK Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology.

The  IUPHAR/BPS Guide to PHARMACOLOGY has been given a hidden REF award in the category ‘applications of research’

Congratulations to Giovanni Stracquadanio who has been awarded an EPSRC Fellowship worth £1.35M on generative recombination enzyme engineering for therapeutics.

Congratulations to SynthSys member Nadanai  Laohakunakorn, who is the recipient of a UK government fellowship that supports researchers and innovators with outstanding potential.

Scientists have developed an environmentally-friendly way of boosting the production and heat stability of a natural blue colouring known as phycocyanin, or spirulina extract

Congratulations to Diego Oyarzun, SynthSys PI  and Reader in the School of Informatics and Biological Sciences,  who has been appointed as a 2021 Turing Fellow.

Researchers have developed and used an improved genetic code expansion system for optical control of gene expression in an animal.

The University’s first Data Driven Entrepreneurship (DDE) Academic Entrepreneurship Award is presented to a member of academic staff who has shown outstanding leadership in driving entrepreneurship among students and fellow researchers.

A new study in Nature Cell Biology has brought clarity to how cells become or stay pluripotent - the ability to go on to produce multiple cell types. 

Congratulations to Synthsys PI Dr Katherine Dunn, who has been named in the Top 50 Women in Engineering by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES).

Scientists have devised a novel way of tackling the mounting issue of plastic pollution… by using bacteria to transform plastic waste into vanilla flavouring.

A multi-disciplinary team, including SynthSys & CRM PI Dr Tilo Kunath , has won the 2021 Analytical Division Horizon Prize: Robert Boyle Prize for Analytical Science

Jamie Davies, Professor of Experimental Anatomy in the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, has been awarded the inaugural Wolpert Medal from the British Society for Developmental Biology.

Edinburgh Genome Foundry has invested in a cutting edge system, funded by a £2 million grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), that will speed advances in medicine and fast-track other areas of science.

Researchers from Dr Baojun Wang's lab at SynthSys have found a reliable way to break and then fix important proteins by biological glues. This creates better opportunities to program proteins and make biocomputational circuits. 

An £8.7 million, five-year research collaboration led by the University of Edinburgh and FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies UK (FDB) will develop more cost-effective ways to make modern antibody-based medicines.

The understanding of many common cancers could be revolutionised by the discovery that in some cases the disease is partly triggered by large numbers of inherited genetic mutations, previously thought to have little impact on cancer risk.