Dr Joaquin Caro Astorga

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

I did my PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Malaga, in Spain with internships at Harvard University and the University of Groningen. I studied the molecular basis governing biofilm formation in Bacillus cereus, a human pathogen that commonly produce food poisoning. <br/><br/>I became an expert in Synthetic Biology during my postdoc at Imperial College London, engineering K. rhaeticus bacteria that produces cellulose-based biomaterials. I also developed a Golden Gate genetic toolkit to engineer Gram-positive bacteria that is now the standard for synthetic biology in this group of bacteria. In my second postdoc, I joined the Francis Crick Institute to develop a project to engineer bacteria to make them able to survive on Mars.<br/><br/>As a group leader at LSBU, I am currently developing projects to engineer Bacillus subtilis spores to display antigens and enzymes for vaccine development and biomedical and environmental applications.