Associate Professor Victoria Haritos research brings together biology and engineering to address future manufacturing needs. She is interested in discovering and designing enzymes for specific and fast reactions as isolated bio-catalysts. In addition, she is researching the metabolic engineering and systems biology of cells in culture the underlying reasons behind their heterogeneity and how this can be modified – using our recently installed high throughput culture and single cell analysis facility. Using bio-catalysts at different scales; the simplest scale being the isolated enzyme to the most complex such as a self-replicating cell. Each approach has their benefits and disadvantages. The cheapest and easiest to implement is an isolated bio-catalysts but these have limited capacity for product formation and processing. At the other extreme, whole cells have complex biochemical pathways to consider and require approaches like metabolic engineering or synthetic biology to streamline and improve production of selected metabolites.
Research interests
Enzyme discovery and design; metabolic engineering of yeast and bacteria; systems biology of cultured cells.