EVOPROG consortium
Last news: Brödel, A.K., Jaramillo, A. & Isalan M. Directed evolution of orthogonal dual transcription factors for synthetic logic gates. Accepted in Nature Communications, Oct 18 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13858
EVOPROG is an FP7 Fet Proactive project "General-Purpose Programmable Evolution Machine on a Chip" under contract number 610730. We aim at constructing a general-purpose programmable evolution machine able to quickly evolve new biomolecules or phenotypes in bacterial cells. Our device uses existing phage technology and synthetic regulation to implement a programmable directed evolution machine able to produce biomolecules or biocomputational functionality two orders of magnitude faster than conventional techniques, while consuming fewer consumables.
This project was designed by Prof. Alfonso Jaramillo in 2012, but it was not funded. Then he gathered an outstanding consortium of researchers and it was funded by EU under the FET Proactive program.
We held the final conference on Sep 15-16, 2016 at Stratford-upon-Avon at Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
Programmable Evolution
We aim at programming phage and bacteria to "compute" combinatorial optimisation algorithms. Using genetic circuits we combine several different selective pressures to obtain phenotypes of interest.
An engine for in vivo-Directed Evolution
We create custom labware to face the challenges of directed evolution in continuous mode. By implementing complex flow control we are able to explore evolutionary potential of bacteria and phages alike.