Monday, May 15
10:30 a.m.
Auditorium between Blgs. 4&5 – L0 – 0215 or Zoom
From Genetics parts to synthetic genomes
By Prof. “Patrick” Yizhi Cai, The University of Manchester
Abstract
Over the last 9 years, my lab has been building synthetic yeast chromosomes from scratch. These synthetic yeast cells are engineered to allow genome-wide directed evolution with a system called 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. Finally, I will also discuss the progress of making a minimal yeast genome with genome SCRaMbLEing.
About the speaker
Prof. “Patrick” Yizhi Cai received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in China, a master’s degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a Ph.D. in Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Virginia Tech, USA. Prof. Cai had his postdoctoral fellowship under Jef Boeke at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prof. Cai serves as a senior scientific consultant to Beijing Genomics Institute and is the first Autodesk Distinguished Scholar. From 2013 to 2017, Prof. Cai had his own research group at the University of Edinburgh with a prestigious Chancellor’s Fellowship, and his lab focuses on Computer Assisted Design for Synthetic Biology, NeoChromosome design and synthesis in the yeast, and DNA assembly automation.
In the summer of 2017, Prof. Cai moved to the University of Manchester as the new chair professor in synthetic genomics. Prof. Cai co-founded Edinburgh Genome Foundry, the International Centre for Synthetic Genomics at BGI, and the GP-Write China Centre at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2022, Prof. Cai was awarded by EPSRC with a five-year fellowship to work on biosecurity and biosafety mechanisms for synthetic genomes. In 2023, Prof. Cai was awarded an ERC Consolidator Award to engineer non-coding RNAs using a synthetic genomics approach.
