Skretas Lab

The research activities of our lab lie at the interface of biology, chemistry and engineering. It is a multi-disciplinary lab employing researchers with different types of expertise, such as molecular biology, engineering, chemistry and agricultural sciences. The main goal of Skretas lab is the development of engineered microbial cells with the ability to perform novel and complex functions by employing principles of Synthetic Biology. The lab utilizes simple organisms, such as the bacterium Escherichia coli, the yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris, and the microalgae Spirulina platensis and nannochloropsis as “biological chassis” and seeks to evolve them into efficient “cell factories” for the production of valuable chemical and biological products, and for the performance of industrially important processes, such as drug sensing and discovery, biotransformations etc. Genetic engineering techniques are applied in order to redesign and rearrange the genome of the organism of interest, while protein engineering (directed protein evolution) and synthetic biology approaches are utilized so as to introduce novel functions in the cell. A key aspect of the work that is carried out is the design and development of high-throughput screening systems, which are used to isolate the rare biomolecules and microbial strains that execute the desired function among large combinatorial libraries comprising hundreds of millions of variants.