ProfessorJohn Heap
Visiting Professor
Department of Life Sciences - Faculty of Natural Sciences
Orcid identifier0000-0001-9991-5160 (opens in a new tab)
- Visiting ProfessorDepartment of Life Sciences - Faculty of Natural Sciences
- Bessemer Building, South Kensington Campus, United Kingdom
BIO
Dr John Heap is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Synthetic Biology in the Department of Life Sciences and the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology (IC-CSynB). The group website is at heaplab.org.
The Heap lab was based at Imperial 2013-2019, and then largely moved to the University of Nottingham, which is now its main home.
Dr Heap is the Principal Investigator of the GlycoCell UKRI Engineering Biology Mission Hub, one of the UK's flagship investments in Engineering Biology, through which we are applying synthetic biology to glycoengineering to unlock new routes to vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and new drug targets.
We are interested in the design and construction of synthetic biological systems which process matter, energy and information in useful ways not observed in nature. Our research involves both the development of foundational biological technologies and their use for applications, mainly in chemical manufacture and in health. An important aspect of this research is developing reliable approaches to implement synthetic biological systems using diverse organisms important (or with the potential to be) in industrial or medical applications. Engineering metabolism is often important for our applications, and a particular interest is how non-natural metabolic constraints can be used to re-direct fluxes and achieve high yields.
We work on several different types of organisms, but focus most on Clostridium and cyanobacteria, in which we are developing and applying new approaches to exploit the great metabolic potential of these important microorganisms. We also now work on enzyme evolution.
If you are not a scientist (or even if you are) and would like a non-specialist introduction to some of our research interests and motivations, have a look at John's ‘IdeasLab’ presentation at the World Economic Forum on YouTube: 'Hacking exotic organisms and putting them to work'
The Heap lab was based at Imperial 2013-2019, and then largely moved to the University of Nottingham, which is now its main home.
Dr Heap is the Principal Investigator of the GlycoCell UKRI Engineering Biology Mission Hub, one of the UK's flagship investments in Engineering Biology, through which we are applying synthetic biology to glycoengineering to unlock new routes to vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and new drug targets.
We are interested in the design and construction of synthetic biological systems which process matter, energy and information in useful ways not observed in nature. Our research involves both the development of foundational biological technologies and their use for applications, mainly in chemical manufacture and in health. An important aspect of this research is developing reliable approaches to implement synthetic biological systems using diverse organisms important (or with the potential to be) in industrial or medical applications. Engineering metabolism is often important for our applications, and a particular interest is how non-natural metabolic constraints can be used to re-direct fluxes and achieve high yields.
We work on several different types of organisms, but focus most on Clostridium and cyanobacteria, in which we are developing and applying new approaches to exploit the great metabolic potential of these important microorganisms. We also now work on enzyme evolution.
If you are not a scientist (or even if you are) and would like a non-specialist introduction to some of our research interests and motivations, have a look at John's ‘IdeasLab’ presentation at the World Economic Forum on YouTube: 'Hacking exotic organisms and putting them to work'
FACULTY
- Faculty of Natural Sciences
POSITION NAME
- Visiting Professor