Manchester Institute of (MIB)

March 2017 Report

Recent Grants Success

 Congratulations to David Leys, Nigel Scrutton and Andy Munro on a recent award from Shell of £2.5M. There is an unmet industrial need for new biocatalysts that can provide alternative and renewable routes to oil derived fuels and commodity chemicals. This project seeks to derive novel and green production routes to commodity chemicals using renewable feedstocks.

 Eriko Takano and Rainer Breitling have been awarded a €5M European H2020 grant entitled ‘TOPCAPI: Thoroughly Optimised Production Chassis for Advanced Pharmaceutical Ingredients’ (UoM funding €1.5M). This project, which is being coordinated by Eriko, will be carried out by a consortium of six academic partners from five institutions from across Europe together with three SMEs. The TOPCAPI project will exploit the natural fabrication power of actinomycetes as microbial cell factories to produce high-value pharmaceutical ingredients.

 Douglas Kell and Philip Day have been awarded over £0.5M from the BBSRC for a project entitled ‘The roles of transporters in the human metabolic network’.

 Jason Micklefield has secured a five year grant from The Royal Society International Collaboration Awards entitled ‘Sustainable Production and Diversification of Natural Products to Combat Diseases in the Developing World’. This grant is a collaboration with Prof Lixin Zhang from East China University of Science and Technology. Prof Zhang is also a member of the SYNBIOCHEM Centre External Advisory Board.

 Andy Munro has been awarded a BBSRC grant on ‘Interrogation of the catalytic properties of MhuD - a crucial heme oxygenase in Mycobacterium tuberculosis’.

 Alan Dickson, Andrew Munro and Eddie McKenzie have been awarded a two year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with Hart Biologics.

 Alan Dickson was also been awarded a four year PDRA position as part of the AstraZeneca Internal Post-Doc call working on ‘Using CRISPRa/i to tune expression host cells to improve recombinant protein production’.

Events

 MIB hosted the 2nd ‘Protein-Excipient Interactions and Protein-Protein Interactions in Formulation (PIPPI) Workshop’ in February. This Innovative Training Network (ITN) event, funded under the European Horizon2020 programme, was arranged by Robin Curtis.

 Eriko Takano was on the organising committee for the Cold Spring Harbor Asia Synthetic Biology Meeting in Suzhou, China at the end of 2016.

 Terry Brown has recently been invited to give two keynote lectures. The first is on 'Ancient DNA and Archaeobotany' at the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) meeting in Gothenburg (July 2017). The second is at the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) Congress meeting in Birmingham (Sept 2017).

 Alan Dickson and Jo Flannelly have arranged a number of events over the last few months as part of the BioProNET Network in Industrial Biotechnology (NIBB):

o CHO cell workshop (Manchester, December 2016), funded by BBSRC and EPSRC. o Protein Aggregation Workshop (Manchester, February 2017), funded by BBSRC, EPSRC and MedImmune

Prizes and Awards

 The 2017 iGEM team (supervised by Eriko Takano and Rainer Breitling) worked on a project on bio-based AlcoPatch alcohol awareness tool, which won the Gold medal and special award for 'Best Computational Model' and was shortlisted for the 'Best Education and Public Engagement' award.

 The ‘Faculty of Science and Engineering's Better World Awards’ were set up to celebrate the various social responsibility contributions made by its staff and students. This year the MIB was well represented with nominations for: o Nick Weise (MIB Public Engagement Programme) o Chris Blanford (Materials Science Outreach) o Perdi Barran, Hannah Roberts and Emma Mellor (international Masses4Masses dissemination initiative)

Social Responsibly

 The ‘Manchester Quantum Biology Team’ (Nigel Scrutton, and Alex Jones) gave a SciBar talk at The Vale Inn in Bollington, Macclesfield on the area of ‘Quantum Biology’.

 As part of the School of Chemistry's new video outreach initiative, filming of MIB researchers and facilities was undertaken within the building. The aim of the project is to highlight high impact science and communicate it in a simple fashion to a general audience by means of a dedicated YouTube channel. The videos included contributions from Jason Micklefield, Nick Turner, Nigel Scrutton, Perdita Barran, David Leys and Alex Jones.

 Hanan Messiha and Nick Weise, in partnership with Multilingual Manchester from the Faculty of Humanities, delivering a weekend enrichment session in Arabic at the Noor Arabic School in Burnage (students aged 7-18). The event was organised as part of the MIB’s partnership with Multilingual Manchester to engage immigrant and second language English communities with science in their own language according to the linguistic needs of the City. Hanan first gave a talk about being a research scientist in the MIB and then engaged the supplementary school students with demonstrations and interactive activities on DNA and .

 As part of the publicity for Terry Brown’s new text book, which came out in 2016, the publishers arranged for the whole England cricket team to sign a copy of the book. This image shows England cricket captain Alistair Cook holding the signed copy.