Congratulations to Drs. Graeme Howe and Richard Oleschuk who received funding through the New Frontiers in Research Fund!
“Directed evolution is an incredibly powerful process to identify biomolecules with new or improved properties for use as therapeutics or industrial applications. However, the gene diversification that occurs during directed evolution generates extremely large mutant libraries that renders the process time-consuming requiring many sub-culturing steps. Drs. Graeme Howe and Richard Oleschuk are developing a new screening platform for directed evolution that will eliminate the need for sub-culturing, decreasing the process time while still enabling high-throughput evaluation screening. The team will apply their expertise in analytical and organic chemistry, microbiology, enzymology, data science, and machine learning to develop the new platform. Using this new platform the team aims to evolve an industrially useful biocatalyst that can produce valuable esters and lactones (common moieties in drugs) from affordable precursors. Additionally, they will also use the platform to screen variants of known genetically encoded antibiotics for new and improved therapeutic activities to combat the rising tide of antimicrobial resistance.”
You can find more information on Queen’s NFRF results in the Gazette.