Engineering and Safeguarding Synthetic Genomes

 

 

Engineering and Safeguarding Synthetic Genomes

 

Date: 15^th August, 2025 (Friday)

Time: 5 - 6 pm (HKT)

 

Venue: Lecture Theatre P3, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building

 

 

 

Manchester Insitute of Biotechnology

The University of Manchester

 

Professor Patrick Cai (PC, Manchester) is Chair Professor in Synthetic Genomics and a world-leading expert in synthetic chromosomes, with a highly interdisciplinary research group. He is an elected member of Academia Europaea, in recognition of his pioneering work in engineering synthetic genomes. In 2017, Prof. Cai’s team published 7 research articles in the journal Science and featured on its cover. And in 2023, he published another set of synthetic chromosome papers in the journals Cell and Cell Genomics, which featured on both covers.

 

Prof. PC is the international coordinator for the (Sc2.0) Consortium, which is composed of over 10 top universities from 4 continents aiming to synthesize the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome. PC founded Edinburgh Genome Foundry, which is the largest automated DNA synthesis and assembly facility in academia today. PC regularly provides advice and consultancies to the Cabinet office, the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technologies.

 

Prof. PC holds prestigious visiting professorships with MIT (US), MRC LMB at Cambridge (UK), Hong Kong University and Chinese Academy of Sciences (China). In 2022, PC was awarded a 5 year EPSRC fellowship to work on biosecurity and biosafety mechanisms for synthetic genomes. In 2023, PC was awarded an ERC Consolidator Award to engineer non-coding RNAs using a synthetic genomics approach.

 

Over the last 12 years, my lab has been building synthetic yeast chromosomes from scratch. These synthetic genomes are engineered to allow genome-wide directed evolution with a system call SCRaMbLE (Synthetic Chromosome Recombination and Modification by LoxP-Mediated Evolution). SCRaMbLE allows the synthetic cells to process the information (e.g. environmental stress) differently from their wildtype counterparts, and also enables them to re-configure the genomes to cope with the environments. I will present our latest progress in design, synthesis and transplant synthetic chromosomes and its applications. Finally, I will also discuss the progress of developing biocontainment strategies for synthetic genomes.