Engineering Biology for the Remediation and Bio-upcycling of Drug Waste
University of Edinburgh School of Biological Sciences
Deadline: Tuesday 13 May 2025
Competition Funded PhD Project (UK Students Only)
About the Project
Microorganisms can be reprogrammed using modern Engineering Biology methods to produce sustainable chemicals and products from renewable feedstocks. This includes the use of ‘waste’ as a metabolic feedstock to enable bio-upcycling to new industrial products and the creation of circular bio-economies. However, many industrial waste sources are not known microbial feedstocks and therefore methods must be sought to adapt and engineer cellular metabolism to accept such organic small molecules if biotechnologies to remediate these wastes are ever to be developed. This PhD project will use a combination of engineering biology and adaptive laboratory evolution methods to create microorganisms that can grow on illicit substances seized by Police Scotland. This will create new microbial systems that can both grow on and convert alkaloid drug molecules into biomass and new industrial products, respectively. These substances are currently disposed via incineration in the UK, with a significant cost to the UK taxpayer and releasing significant greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, this project views these compounds as a chemical resource for microorganisms and the future bioeconomy and will as such demonstrate the first use of drug compounds and drug simulants as microbial feedstocks and biosynthetic substrates. The project will involve close collaboration with Police Scotland, UK leading engineering biology experts at the University of Edinburgh and local biotechnology companies in Scotland, and will expose the doctoral student to a wide range of multidisciplinary skills in synthetic biology, analytical chemistry (GC, HPLC, NMR), automated adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) and scale-up bioreactor process optimisations. The student will be co-supervised by Prof. Stephen Wallace and Prof. Susan Rosser in the Centre for Engineering Biology at the University of Edinburgh and in close collaboration with the Edinburgh Genome Foundry and Police Scotland.
PhD project start date: 1st October 2025.