The Clarke Society’s annual Best Publication Prize recognises outstanding research by postgraduate students in UCL Biochemical Engineering. This year’s competition featured an impressive range of research topics, with reviewers highlighting the exceptional quality of both the research and the writing across all submissions. While the standard was exceptionally high, the judging panel ultimately selected a clear winner.
The winning paper was by 4th-year EngD student Danielle Deuker, titled “Adeno-Associated Virus 5 Protein Particles Produced by E. coli Cell-Free Protein Synthesis”, published in ACS Synthetic Biology.
In the publication, Danielle demonstrates a rapid and simplified method for producing AAV5 virus-like particles (VLPs) without cell culture. Using a cell-free system, the publication shows that soluble capsid proteins can be efficiently generated and purified, reducing process complexity and production time. We also demonstrate that these proteins self-assemble into VLPs. Danielle’s work highlights cell-free protein synthesis as a flexible platform for AAV research, particularly for capsid engineering due to its open and modular nature. Importantly, this approach could be extended to other complex self-assembling protein systems.
Reviewers commented: “The abstract is well written, clearly stating a key quantitative findings and highlighting key outcomes of the study. The introduction and abstract combined provide a nice summary of AAV and CFPS background, highlighting the bottlenecks in current production processes.” And “Reviewer 2: Excellent paper, the research was of high quality and summarised well.”
Well done, Danielle!
Congratulations, also to runner-up Laia Miranda with her paper “Assessing mixing performance and power consumption in the ambr® 250 bioreactor” published in ScienceDirect . “The conclusions are well structured and offer practical operating guidance relevant to the broader bioprocess engineering field.”
