Fungal factories
Learn more about how the synthetic and chemical biology team engineer fungi for the production of bioactive molecules as insecticides or therapeutics.
What is the problem?
Fungi makes amazing molecules with insecticidal, anti-cancer or anti-bacterial properties—but only in tiny amounts.
What are we doing?
We use synthetic biology to create fungal factories, by expressing entire gene clusters in another fungus and using synthetic biology tools, we can produce these target molecules with much higher efficiency. We also mix-and-match genes to create new bioactive molecules.
What is the impact?
Patent protection, bioactivity testing, and large-scale fermentation optimisation will enable us to unlock the potential of these valuable molecules as insecticides or therapeutics.
Research team
Synthetic and chemical biology team
Using biosynthetic machinery for products and computational experiments to study protein networks.
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Read about Radio New Zealand's coverage of the fungal factories project