Engineering the Green Chemical Factories of Tomorrow with Anne Osbourn
Join us for a journey through the architecture of biosynthetic gene clusters and how they're unlocking new frontiers in metabolic engineering. Professor Osbourn will discuss how her lab harnesses these genomic blueprints to reconstruct complex pathways for high-value compounds, such as saponins, offering a sustainable, scalable future for medicine, agriculture, and industrial biotechnology.
Don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the leading minds in plant synthetic biology, as she shares insights on engineering the green chemical factories of tomorrow.
Speaker's bio
Professor Anne Osbourn is a world-renowned Project Leader at the John Innes Centre, Director of the Norwich Research Park Industrial Biotechnology Alliance, and co-founder of HotHouse Therapeutics.
With over thirty years of international research leadership, her work focuses on unlocking the chemical engineering capabilities of plants to discover and manufacture natural products for medicinal, agricultural, and industrial use. A landmark breakthrough from her lab was the discovery that genes for specific plant metabolic pathways are organised in operon-like clusters, a finding that has dramatically accelerated the global discovery of novel chemistries. Building on this, her group established a transient plant expression platform enabling rapid, gram-scale synthetic biology access to previously inaccessible natural products and structural analogs.
In recognition of her contributions, she has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and holds an OBE.
Beyond the lab, Professor Osbourn is an accomplished poet, author of collections including Mock Orange and Rockall, and founder of the SAW Trust (Science, Art and Writing), a charity dedicated to cross-curricular science outreach in schools.