Dr Michael Asemoloye is a Senior Lecturer at Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha in South Africa. His research focuses on Mycology and Biotechnology, Enhancing different microbial strains for biosynthesis of important natural products. He obtained his PhD degree with option in Mycology/Biotechnology from the University of Ibadan and from the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Tianjin University in China completed a 3 year Postdoc in Synthetic Biology. Here he major on design/engineering of various synthetic yeasts as genetic biodevice and biosensors. Many valuable microbes are not usually evolved to act or produce desired products in quantities enough for human exploration. It is thus need to improve/maximize their metabolic and regulatory networks through genetic engineering.
Dr Asemoloye seeks to use synthetic biology and genetic engineering tools for this using Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast). He has so far reconstructed pathways associated with NPs driven by genes/biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) from filamentous fungi into yeast cells. He has also designed various biosensors that can detect hydrocarbons and potention track or monitor their metabolism in vitro. Dr Asemoloye's project is designed to establish a reliable protocol for the integration of genes into the yeast genome using the CRISPR-Cas9 or CRISPR-Cas12a system for building complex synthetic digital transcription networks for application as biosensors, molecular classifiers, and DNA computing.
