 We all know yeast as the ingredient that makes beer, bread, wine and champagne. But what if we could reprogram yeast to make medicines for us, materials, or make it sense and respond to its environment? This is what synthetic biology is bringing to us. Yeast is our original biotechnology. We've been fermenting alcohol with it for thousands of years. And since the 1980s, with the arrival of GM technologies, we've been able to cut and paste things like human DNA encoding genes that produce things like insulin, the medicine needed by diabetics. But synthetic biology is taking this to a whole new level now. It's fueled by advances in DNA sequencing where thousands of life's genomes have been sequenced, giving us access to the DNA sequence of millions of life's genes, and importantly also in chemistry, where DNA printing can now be done cheaply and rapidly to design. Synthetic biology brings these two advances together so that we can print out the DNA sequence of genes from diverse sources around nature and combine them together in new ways not seen before in nature in organisms that we can work with like yeast. There's so many possibilities when you're tackling with millions of possible genes that the only way to progress in this subject is to think like an engineer would. My research group at Imperial College focuses on turning biotechnology into an engineering discipline, developing the tools that allow things like computer-aided design of DNA sequence, automated DNA assembly, and rapid fabrication and testing of genes in organisms like yeast. When we just combine two or three genes together in combinations never seen before in nature, we can do things like change the way yeast grows, so that we can get yeast to grow in patterns that we define by the topology of the circuits of the genes that are put together, and we can change the timing of when and where those patterns of growth occur. If we start remixing five or six genes from across diverse organisms in nature, organisms like orchids, slime molds that are exotic and make interesting molecules, then we can get these genes to make our yeast not turn sugar into alcohol, but turn sugar into valuable molecules like antibiotics. In my group, we now have a yeast that makes its own penicillin. The engineering principles allow us to do this very straightforward. So straightforward that even undergraduate students over summer can do projects like this, where they can take the genes from carrots that make the antioxidant beta-carotene, insert these into yeast, and potentially now have yeast that can make a more nutritious bread. When you go up to dozens of genes from across nature, the possibilities become enormous. So it's no surprise that dozens, even hundreds of startup companies have emerged that remix genes across nature and get yeast to produce products of high value, things like anti-malarial, medicines, food and cosmetic ingredients. But we can do much better than dozens of genes. What about yeast's own operating system? 6,000 genes, 12 million base pairs, it's genome, and part of the world's largest synthetic biology project, an international collaboration to redesign, rewrite, assemble a synthetic version of the yeast genome to create yeast 2.0. We use a DNA software program which automatically redesigns the genome sequence to add new features, and those genome sequences, we can then email pieces of those to companies that then print the DNA for us and FedEx the DNA chunks back, which we then click together in my lab, add into yeast and gradually turn it into the synthetic version of yeast. Think about where this could go. Think about something out of this world. If all we're doing is designing sequence and emailing it to be printed elsewhere, this is something that could even be done one day in space, maybe in the International Space Station. It's no surprise therefore that NASA is very interested in synthetic biology and investing in this area. Because the beauty of synthetic biology is that the DNA designs go into machines that are cells which are self-replicating. They can grow and we can get product from them. And yeast is an organism where we're very adept at being able to get product from it because of the hundreds of years of experience we have in brewing. Large breweries and micro breweries and home brew too. So one can imagine a future where micro breweries around the world, from the UK to Africa to outer space, could be reprogrammed with DNA printers attached to them so that you could email them the sequences for medicines that are needed when and where they're needed. We're reprogrammed with this DNA to produce the medicines on site. This is a great example of distributed manufacture, something that biology itself excels at doing. But it raises an interesting question. We're used to our medicines being made by big pharmaceutical companies in dedicated factories that can control quality and safety. These key attributes, how can we guarantee them when people are now home brewing their medicines through this distributed manufacturing model? Thank you.