Our Mission

To develop the foundational multidisciplinary tools needed to de-risk environmentally focused engineering biology and ultimately support its future deployment into real-world ecosystems.

Engineering biology offers new ways to tackle environmental challenges such as pollution and the removal of harmful compounds. Yet before engineered organisms can be released outside the laboratory, we need to understand how they behave in complex, living ecosystems, and how to be confident they are safe.

The CYBER Mission Award brings together researchers from across disciplines, including biology, engineering, data science, metrology and the social sciences, to build the shared tools, data and standards this requires. Our work centres on cyanobacteria, photosynthetic microbes that play a vital role in natural environments and that can be reprogrammed to perform useful functions.

De-Risk Environmental Synthetic Biology

Create ecological wind tunnels that mimic real-world complexity to assess the safety of engineered organisms.

Programmable Cyanobacteria

Develop high-throughput experiments to create the genetic toolkits needed to reprogram environmentally important microbes.

AI for Engineering Biology

Accelerate reliable cellular reprogramming by learning from diverse experimental data sets.

Improved Cyber-Bio Security

Enable the traceability of engineered cells in natural environments to ensure trustworthiness.

Biological Standards & Metrology

Demonstrate the power of rigorous applications of standards and metrology for biological engineering.

Community Building

Establish the teams and connect with the people able to ensure the long-term benefits of this research are realised.