Research Themes

Synthetic biology, gene editing, molecular biology, bioengineering.

Creating new gene editing tools and synthetic biology technologies, by exploring the natural protein diversity of viruses.

Scientific Vision

We are a new synthetic biology, molecular biology and biotechnology-focused research group.

The common theme across our scientific work is exploring natural diversity to identify proteins with novel functions or properties, studying and characterising them, and finally engineering them to create new technologies. 

We study a fascinating and unusual class of viruses which use a unique mode of protein-primed DNA replication to propagate their linear DNA genomes. These represent one of the few known biological systems in which protein-DNA covalent bonds can be naturally found. This group of viruses is very understudied but hold great promise for exciting biotechnology applications. In particular, we are exploring how to repurpose these viral replication proteins to create innovative new tools for gene editing to treat human genetic disease.