Dr. Vincent Martin

Much like studying one part of a complex machine gives few clues as to what the assembled product will look like, our knowledge of biology has reached a point where a reductionist approach is also not sufficient. "If we know all the parts of the system and have some general idea as to how they are assembled and work together, why not tinker with them much like engineers do. This is what our laboratory and metabolic engineers do,"said Martin. "We combine science and engineering principals to design and build novel biological functions and systems."

"Our focus is on engineering microbes to produce better, cheaper or even novel products," continued Martin. "Microbes such as yeast and E. coli are our machines of choice. We swap, mutate, add and eliminate genes at will to create biological factories that can be fed simple and inexpensive carbon sources and churn out copious amounts of a desired product, be it a commodity chemical like biofuels or a molecule with health value."