Profile

Career

Departmental roles

 Chair of Departmental Research Committee

Research

Overview

The major research themes of our laboratory are microbial metabolism, biocatalysis and environmental biotechnology. A primary goal is to understand how microorganisms have adapted to utilise xenobiotic compounds as carbon and nitrogen sources for growth. The enzymes mediating these pathways often have potential commercial applications as recognition components in biosensors, as biocatalysts for synthetic chemistry, for the production of biofuels and for the bioremediation of soil and ground water. We are now engaged in extensive structural analysis of a number of these enzymes using X-ray crystallography. Work is also focusing on generating carefully designed mutant forms of a number of these enzymes to understand their catalytic mechanisms. A principal theme of our research is the biodegradation, biotransformation and phytoremediation of explosives.

Discoveries

We discovered a novel cytochrome P450 system termed XplA/B from Rhodococcus rhodochrous (11Y) that degrades the high explosive RDX. As a model system for RDX phytoremediation, Arabidopsis expressing XplA/B were grown in RDX contaminated soil and found to remove and degrade the explosive from the soil. Our work suggests that expressing XPlA/B in landscape plants may provide a suitable remediation strategy for explosive contaminated sites.

Projects

• Sustainable range management of RDX and TNT by phytoremediation with engineered plants (Funding body: SERDP)
• New tools for the realisation of cost-effective liquid biofuels from plant biomass (joint with Simon McQueen-Mason) (Funding body: BBSRC)
• Targeted analysis of microbial lignocellulolytic secretomes - a new approach to enzyme discovery. biomass (Funding body: Bilateral BBSRC-FAPESP)
• Exposing explosives: novel synthetic gene circuits for explosive detection via innovative waveguide sensing (Funding body: BBSRC)
• Studying Effect of Dutasteride on plant growth and development using Arabidopsis.  (Funded by Brunel University).
• Development of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes for the Chemical Manufacturing Industries (funded body: EU FP7 Marie Curie ITN)
• Phytocat (Funding body: G8 EPSRC) JC/NCB
• BBSRC RICEFUELS Engineering Enzymes, bacteria and bioconversion processes for advanced biofuels from waste grain straw
• BBSRC Marine Wood Borer Enzyme Programme (Start date 01 04 14)

Research group(s)

Available PhD research projects

Mining composting communities for new lignocellulose mobilising enzymes (2015-16)

From both a fundamental and industrial biotech viewpoint understanding the deconstruction of lignocellulose in soil and compost is of central importance. In the natural environments microbial communities can efficiently degrade or modify lignin to enable the effective enzymatic hydrolysis of the polysaccharides present in plant cell walls. Globally, this is important for cycling carbon in the environment and as potential sources of biocatalysts for efforts at converting plant biomass into biofuels and commodity chemicals. The objectives of this project are to use metatranscriptomics and proteomics to determine gene- and protein-centred details to determine new mechanisms and improved methods of lignocellulose deconstruction in mixed microbial communities from composting cereal straw. The project will use proteomics analysis to interrogate the secretome of microbial communities in composting cereal straw and metatranscriptomics will be used to explore the expression of genes associated with lignocellulose digestion. To identify new linocellulose degrading enzymes, the peptide sequences from the proteomics analysis will be used to probe the metatranscriptomic library for full and partial coding sequences. These coding sequences will be cloned, expressed and the recombinant proteins characterised.

Co-directors:Simon McQueen-Mason