Synthetic Microbiology

Synthetic biology employs engineering principles to design and build biological components. Using standardized biological parts, synthetic biology aims at the assembling of biological modules, entire biological systems, or even biological machines for useful purposes.

In this course, you will learn how to design and assemble synthetic operons from standardized parts like promoters, ribosome binding sites (RBS), coding sequences and terminators. Synthetic genetic constructs will be used to produce high-value metabolites, e.g. perfumes, in the model chassis Escherichia coli. The course will cover the function of whole-cell biosensors as well as principals of metabolic engineering and directed evolution.