PhD student in Biotechnology,
Industrial fermentations with engineered microorganisms allow us to produce many commodity and specialty chemicals from sugar instead of fossil fuels. Yet sugar feedstocks come with their own problems, particularly the land and energy needed to grow the crops. The fermentations of the future will need flexibility in both their feedstocks and the types of microorganisms used to turn these into useful chemicals. Reza is attempting to engineer the bacterium Cupriavidus necator to overproduce the amino acid arginine using Synthetic Biology and Metabolic Engineering techniques, to see if it can be developed into a strain that can compete with current industrial microorganisms while using alternative feedstocks to sugar such as CO2.
Prior to starting his PhD at Nottingham, Reza studied his undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of York, working on projects in structural enzymology towards the use of enzyme catalysts to replace fossil fuel-derived chemical processes.
Faculty of EngineeringThe University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham, NG7 2RD
telephone: +44 (0)115 951 4002 email: SPT@nottingham.ac.uk