UKRI Future Leaders Fellow - Associate Professor

Email: F.Alberti@warwick.ac.uk

Phone: 024 765 23516

Office: B120

 @Alberti.FabrizioLink opens in a new window

Alberti Lab webpage

Research Clusters

Quantitative, Systems & Engineering Biology

Microbiology & Infectious Disease

Environment & Ecology

Vacancies and Opportunities

For PhD and postdoctoral opportunities, and interest in potential collaborations, please contact me at the above email address.

Research Interests

Fungi represent an incredibly rich reservoir of natural products, which often show potent bioactivity and find applications in different fields, including medicine and crop protection. Research in the Alberti Lab aims to discover new molecules from fungi with useful bioactivities and understand how these compounds are assembled.

To this aim, we have recently developed a platform, based on Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast), that accumulates increased amounts of precursors to a specific class of natural products called isoprenoid quinones.

We are also developing new synthetic biology tools to be used in basidiomycete (mushroom-forming) fungi that will enable us and the wider scientific community to exploit the genetic potential of this underexplored class of microorganisms.

You can read Fabrizio's interview taken as part of the School's 'Get to know us' series hereLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window.

Research: Technical Summary

Research in the Alberti Lab is focused on the discovery of novel natural products from fungi of the phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota. We are also interested in the study of the biosynthesis of known bioactive natural products, such as meroterpenoids.

We use a combination of CRISPR/Cas9 - for the genome editing of native host producers - and heterologous gene expression in a range of hosts, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Aspergillus oryzae.

We are also developing tools for the heterologous expression of genes of interest in basidiomycete fungi that will enable for the easier study of complex biosynthetic gene clusters and enzymes that may be developed into biocatalysts.