Making drugs: an integrated approach to improve yield of recombinant proteins in microbial systems

The student will use a broad range of molecular, biochemical and computational techniques to understand the fundamental cellular responses of E. coli to IB formation. In our matched sets of closely related IB and non-IB producing proteins, the student will use molecular biology tools to create hybrid proteins to understand the relationship between protein structure and IB formation and will undertake industry-like fermentations at FDBK Billingham during the project. Matched transcriptomics data is available which will be complemented with proteomics data. Importantly the student will use and help develop our new data integration tool called MORF for the omics data entry and analysis (https://morf-db.org/) and ideally will have some coding experience in Python. The student will then generate hypotheses about host factors involved in IB formation and investigate their effect using our model proteins and other known IB-forming proteins available through FDBK. The student will work primarily in York but will spend time at Teesside and will also do placements at FDBK as an integral part of this academic/industry partnership. Further training is also provided by IBioIC.