IPLS Seminar: Dr. Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro (Imperial College London)

Abstract: Precision fermentation, the production of molecules of interest using engineered microorganisms, is gaining traction as a technology to produce food and food ingredients sustainably.

At Imperial College, we recently launched the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein and the Microbial Food Hub, two new research Centres fully dedicated to making our food system more sustainable, healthy, affordable, and high-quality.

Here, I will introduce the new Centre and its activities as well as my own research in the field of precision fermentation. We use yeast (S. cerevisiae and Y. lipolytica) to produce food ingredients including proteins, lipids, aromas, flavours, textures, vitamins, colorants. To enable high-yield production, we use cutting-edge synthetic biology tools, including multiplexed CRISPR systems and synthetic microbial communities.

We have explored the capacity to manipulate gene expression in a large multiplexed manner using CRISPRai, which allows both activation and repression of target genes [1]. This is enabled by the simultaneous, inducible expression of up to 24 gRNAs in a single transformation, which accelerates the strain engineering cycle [2].

Using synthetic microbial communities we can optimise fermentation dynamics and production, increasing yields via division of labour and population control [3][4][5].

[1] McCarty, N.S., Graham, A.E., Studená, L. et al. Multiplexed CRISPR technologies for gene editing and transcriptional regulation. Nat Commun 11, 1281 (2020).
[2] Shaw, W.M., Studená, L., Roy, K. et al. Inducible expression of large gRNA arrays for multiplexed CRISPRai applications. Nat Commun 13, 4984 (2022).
[3] Aulakh et al. Spontaneously established syntrophic yeast communities improve bioproduction. Nature Chemical Biology (2023)
[4] Peng et al. A molecular toolkit of cross-feeding strains for engineering synthetic yeast communities. Nature Microbiology (2024)
[5] Several unpublished results

Host: Wenying Shou (w.shou@ucl.ac.uk)