Yadav, Vikramaditya

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Research Interests

• Biocatalysis
• Bioremediation
• Bioprocess Engineering
• Drug Delivery
• Infectious Disease Pathogenesis & Drug Discovery
• Green Chemistry
• Medical Biotechnology
• Metabolic Engineering
• Synthetic Biology
• Tissue Engineering

Research Projects

• Biosynthetic & Enzyme Engineering: Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering are principal activities in the lab and we are actively working on fundamental and applied problems in terpenoid and polyketide biosynthesis and lignin valorization. We employ a combination of metagenomics-aided enzyme discovery, rational enzyme engineering, and pathway and genome engineering strategies to engineer strains that produce value-added molecules at higher titres and productivities, and actively collaborate with companies such as Phytonix Corporation and InMed Pharmaceuticals to commercialize these biotechnologies.
• Assay Development for Drug Discovery: Our work on bioengineered assays is currently centred on two domains. The first project, undertaken in Our work on bioengineered assays is currently centred on two domains. The first project, undertaken in collaboration with STEMCELL Technologies and Precision NanoSystems, seeks to assemble three-dimensional, structured brain organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells for use in pre-clinical screening of hits against neurodegenerative diseases. The second project seeks to attenuate the disease-carrying capacity of the mosquito to spread disease by targeting its sense of smell. We are engineering the mosquito olfactory cascade into microbial hosts in order to screen behaviour-modifying compounds in a high-throughput manner.
• Engineering Novel & Better Bioprocesses: We are exploiting the immense ease and efficiency with which biological systems metabolize feedstocks to extract natural resources or produce value-added chemicals and materials to design and develop replacements for traditional chemical manufacturing processes. Our work in biomining addresses one of the most formidable challenges facing the mining industry – the extraction and processing of low-grade, hard-to-access ores. We are working with the Bradshaw Research Initiative for Minerals and Mining and other commercial partners to engineer synthetic microbial consortia to leach copper in packed bed reactors and subsequently deposit the metal in a carbon-neutral microbial fuel cell.