AIRTO member NPL has secured a major International Science Partnership Fund (ISPF) award from Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) within the Japan-UK engineering biology for discovery research and cross-cutting technologies programme, co-funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
Ranked as “Exceptional” the research project, titled: “Orthogonal phages from non-linear sequence topologies: towards an artificial phage-host system” will be delivered in partnership with Professor Hiro Suga and his team at the University of Tokyo, who pioneer chemical methodologies for genetic re-programming.
The funded research will create a first-in-class, chemically inspired phage and explore the basis for its host. The project will use innovative tools for biodesign, genetic re-programming and protocells to introduce an artificial phage-host system making use of revolutionary developments in the design of phage-like capsids (NPL) and flexizyme systems as tools to reprogram the genetic code (Tokyo).
