Dr Matthew Edmundson
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hi, my name is Matt Edmundson.
I came to Edinburgh via an undergrad degree in genetics at the University of Newcastle and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Leeds. I’ve also worked as a post-doc at Cardiff University, working on one project that looked at incorporating non-natural amino acids into proteins and another investigating the motility response of mammalian cells to electric fields.
In my spare time I enjoy hiking, reading, gaming (board and video), and I’ve recently taking up writing after having a short story imagining the future of Synthetic Biology accepted for inclusion in a forthcoming book from SynthSys at the University of Edinburgh.
Public Abstract
Biology is very helpful in many industrial processes; yeast, for example, is used in leavening bread and brewing beer. As well as food some micro-organisms can make useful chemicals and drugs that would be expensive or bad for the environment to make using chemistry. To help make these organisms more efficient or to get them to make different things they wouldn’t normally do naturally we can use genetic engineering to give them new instructions. Getting the DNA into them and keeping it there can be tricky; I’m currently working on a method to get a kind of fungus to take up DNA by firing lasers of different strengths at the cells. With reliable method of getting DNA into the fungi we’ll be better able to develop new DNA instructions to make the fungi even more useful to industry.
Scientific Abstract
Micro-organisms have been used by humans for many thousands of years in making our bread and brewing our beer. Improvements to useful strains have mostly been made by selecting those that perform best, propagating them and again selecting the best from the new generation. Over time this has given rise to all our modern industrially useful micro-organisms, producing a wide range of products from antibiotics to cheese to gin. However this is a slow process, and many desirable traits such as increasing production efficiency or the ability to grow on alternative growth media may be difficult to introduce using traditional techniques. I’m currently working on a project in collaboration with GSK to use Laser Enabled Analysis and Processing (LEAP) technology to develop an efficient method of introducing DNA into industrial fungal strains. Traditional methods of introducing DNA into fungal cells, such as the protoplast transformation method, can result in unwanted changes into the genome. LEAP does not have this problem, and also has the benefit of allowing other biomolecules, such as RNA or proteins, to be introduced into the cell. By having a method of reliably inserting engineered DNA into the fungi we are able to directly introduce desirable traits into industrial strains, thereby increasing their usefulness further.