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There are many venomous plants and animals in our environment, and for the majority of these, we do not have effective ways to treat envenoming or poisonings. We have a long standing interest in using new genomic and CRISPR-based techniques to define how these venoms hurt us, and then use this information to generate new venom antidotes. Our overall goal is to develop a small number of universal venom antidotes that can block the effects of most poisonous venoms. We would also like to use venom components themselves as new medicines, and we have developed new functional genomic approaches to find new bioactive molecules we can then functionally investigate using pooled CRISPR approaches.
A complimentary scholarship for this project may be available through a competitive process. To find out more, refer to the Faculty of Science Postgraduate Research Excellence Award and contact Professor Greg Neely directly.
Research location: Charles Perkins Center
Directed evolution involves generating synthetic circuits where a protein that evolves a new or enhanced activity has an advantage over other proteins that do not have this new trait. This approach is powerful, but until recently has been limited to use in bacterial systems. We have developed a mammalian version of this system, and using this, we can evolve proteins that have new abilities within the mammalian cell. We are using this approach to enhance CRISPR tools, and we are also using this approach to evolve human genes to be used as more potent medicines. The techniques employed in this project include viral-based directed evolution, cellular and molecular biology, CRISPR, fluorescent activated cell sorting, and likely human stem cell derived organoids and / or animal studies.
This project is for PhD candidates
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is 3334