Design, build and test (‘DBT’) of artificial organisms represented a fascinating approach to deepen our understanding of natural biosystems and to facilitate engineering life for applications. The speaker is engaged in understanding life by engineering and functional analysis of the biological components that store or express the genetic information, and in recent years have made some significant achievements as below: 1) synthesis and functional analysis of the longest linear designer eukaryotic chromosome, namely yeast chromosome 12, which “was a significant milestone towards creation of the first fully synthetic eukaryotic genome”; 2) engineering and functional analysis of a series of artificial ribosomes, which uncovered the functions and mechanistic insights of ribosomal RNA and proteins in ribosome assembly, translation and evolution. In this talk, the speaker will present the design principles, approaches, and what could be learnt from the ‘DBT’ cycle of these artificial microorganisms.
Guanghou Zhao is an associated professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University. His research focuses on design, build and test of artificial microorganisms to further the understanding of life and to facilitate engineered life for applications. He has published these experimental results in top-rated journals, including Science, PNAS, Nucleic Acids Research, which were highlighted in special article or previews by Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology et al, and selected as one of the “Ten Breakthrough in Chinese Science 2017”.
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