Professor Kirill Alexandrov
Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland
Date: Friday 23 October
Time: 12:00pm - 12:50pm
Venue: Cairns A3:2; videolinked to Townsville 145:030 (ATSIP)
The central tenet of the emerging field of Synthetic Biology is that biological components can be refined into a toolkit of plug-and-play building blocks. The experimental evidence supporting this idea has so far been limited to relatively slow synthetic gene expression circuits. Real-time events in biological process are mediated by protein-based signaling circuits that can operate up to the millisecond scale. Ability to design protein-based signaling circuits would in principle enable us to design of analytical and diagnostic tests for any analyte.
We developed a range of protein engineering approaches that allowed us to construct a range of synthetic receptors that produce high electron current when activated by a ligand. We demonstrated that such molecules can be easily integrated into the existing Point-of-Care devices and potentially enable us to create the next generation of personal diagnostic devices and applications.
Professor Kirill Alexandrov obtained his Master’s degree in Parasitology at the Leningrad State University, Russia in 1989 and completed his PhD in Cell Biology at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany in 1995. He went on to postgraduate work at the Department of Physical Biochemistry at the Max-Planck Institute in Dortmund, Germany, and remained with the Institute for 12 years, becoming a group leader in 1999.
He co-founded the German biotechnology company JenaBioscience in 1998 and UK/Australian diagnostic company Molecular Warehouse Ltd in 2015. He joined the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Biotechnology of the University of Queensland, Australia in 2008 as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.