We have attended annual meeting of ASBE7 conference and concluded the three days full of Synthetic Biology & Protein engineering (and great food) in Brno the city of Mendel (father of genetics).

 

Our lab members have prepared and edited a new book titled “Synthetic Bİology for Therapeutics”, it will be published by DeGruyter as a part of their STEM book series. The hard copy of the book will be released on November 18, 2024. It can be purchased from Amazon. 

 

 

We hosted Victor de Lorenzo for our seminar series, we thank him for the inspiring talk on “Design meets evolution: Theory and practice” and all these fruitful discussions with our students, future is brighter with synthetic biology.

 

 

We are happy to announce the PhD graduation of our group member Merve Yavuz! She has successfully defended her thesis titled “Genetically Designed Microbes for Bioimaging and Biosensing”. Congratulations!

 

 

Our lab member Ece Avcı has successfully defended her master thesis on developing CRISPR/Cas-13 based therapeutic strategies for Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic fever disease by targeting CCHF Viral genomic material. She has completed in vitro part and now running the in vivo!

 

 

Our lab members Ece Avcı, Doğuş Akboğa and Mehmet Emin Bakar attended #SEED2024 Synthetic Biology Evolution and Design Conference with four posters on living therapeutics, living materials and living biosensors.

 

 

 

One of our PhD students, Recep Erdem Ahan completed his PhD with his studies in the field of synthetic biology at a universal level. His had his thesis on the “Biotechnological Drug Platforms”.

 

 

Glycosylation is a critical post-translational modification which is barely available in bacteria. Here we have presented and engineered genetic circuit for the glycosylation of proteins for enhanced catalytic properties.Gycosylation dramatically enhanced proteolytic resistance, heat and physiological durability of the protein of interest. part of the engineered pathway subunits are over expressed to reach these dramatic changes.

 

We have developed a system for drug screening against non-soluble protein targets in neurodegenerative diseases. The work has been accepted for publication in ACS Chemical Neuroscience and is highlighted on the cover.

 

 

Burcu Ergün, a postdoctoral researcher has presented our recent work on developing an engineered probiotic yeast cell (S. boulardii) as a livint therapeutic for patients with anemia triggered by B12 deficiency at #FEMS2023 in Hamburg Germany- well done Burcu!

 

 

Synbiolab had a great 2022, completed many high impact work, developed innovative research ideas and have many studies highlighted on journal covers! We wish a happy new year to everyone!

 

Our lab presented three talks on our work on Engineered Living Materials at MRSFall2022 in Boston. 

 

Our lab member Ahmet Hınçer won the 2nd Best oral presentation award for his work to develop an innovative synthetic mRNA platform for Vaccine and Drug development in #4thVaccinology Congress. Well done Ahmet! We thank to the jury members!

 

We developed a genetically engineered protein nanomaterial using synthetix biology tools to capture viral particles, including SarsCoV2. It is highlighted on the cover of Advanced Materials Interfaces.

 

 
We are happy to see our lab member Anooshay Khan successfully defended her MSc thesis and graduated from Bilkent U. Neuroscience program. IN her thesis she worked on understanding the inhibition mechanism of protein aggregates in Huntington’s disease using peptide therapeutics.
 
 
 
 
We are happy to announce the graduation of our group member Nedim Kurt. He has successfully passed his MsC defence. During his studies, he has engineered Saccharomyces boulardii as a chassis for living drug applications using CRISPR/Cas. He will be joining Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as a researcher.
 
 
 
Dr. Seker and visiting Dr. Esra Yuca have prepared a book chapter on “How to monitor bacterial amyloid formation, and biofilm assembly in real time” in the book Bacterial Amyloids. 
 
 

 

 
 
We built engineered bacteria which can colonize at tumor site, produce magnetic nanoparticles using a series of genetic circuits for MRI. Our work is published in Small journal.
 
 
 
 
 
 
A new book chapter is published by our lab “Design, Principle and Application of Self-Assembled Nanobiomaterials in Biology and Medicine” , our chapter is entitled “Design and construction of protein and peptide-basedself-assembled nanostructures”.
 
 
 
 
Developing a Sars-CoV-2 blocking lectin protein is out, highlighted from the front cover of ACS Infectious Disease. The potency of GRFT proteins on blocking Wuhan strain, Delta and Omicron variants without causing an immune responseFrom our finding it is obvious that the GRFT protein can be effective on any other type emerging variant as well.
 
 
 
 
“New Frontiers and Applications of Synthetic Biology” book is out, our lab has contributed with two chapters: Chapter 17 – Design of synthetic biological devices for detection and targeting human diseases and Chapter 22 – Design and applications of self-assembled soft living materials using synthetic biology.