We are interested in how microbes learn to metabolise xenobiotic chemicals that are new to the environment and how we can harness the capabilities of microbes to enable cleanup of contaminated sites.
We are researching which industrial chemical reactions can be replaced with biochemical reactions and how can we exploit microbes and enzymes to make useful products.
We are examining the ecological roles of mycobacteria and looking at how can we use them for biotechnology.
We want to know how MGEs work and how they impact bacterial evolution. We are looking at how can we detect and manipulate MGEs to minimise negative effects (eg. antibiotic resistance) and enhance positive effects (eg. pollutant degradation).
We are increasingly taking a SynBio approach to studying various research questions in the lab; this approach is based on themes such as modularity, abstraction, modelling, and standardisation.