Research
For more than 15 years, in the at Cambridge University has conducted research in microbial genetics. Starting from an interest in factors affecting the inheritance of natural multicopy plasmids and cloning vectors in Escherichia coli, research projects now range from the architecture of nucleoprotein complexes in site-specific recombination, to the control of the bacterial cell cycle.
An underpinning philosophy in the laboratory is that in addition to
conducting excellent basic research, it is important to pursue vigorously
any discoveries which show commercial promise.
Applied projects presently include the optimisation of bacterial expression
systems for recombinant proteins and the development of metabolic factories for the production of hydrogen and higher alcohols for use as biofuels.