Research Interests

Key Publications

Florea, Michael, Henrik Hagemann, Gabriella Santosa, James Abbott, Chris N. Micklem, Xenia Spencer-Milnes, Laura de Arroyo Garcia, et al. 2016. “Engineering Control of Bacterial Cellulose Production Using a Genetic Toolkit and a New Cellulose-Producing Strain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (24): E3431–40. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1522985113.

Research Interests

Research Interests

In my PhD in James Locke’s group, I am using a mixture of experiments and theory to understand how cells interact to keep track of the time of day. We found that the circadian clock in individual cells of Arabidopsis thaliana can use local cell-to-cell signalling to agree on the time. I now hope to further this work towards an understanding that may inform growth strategies in the field.

Research interests

I am fascinated by how microorganisms can use their seemly simple and limited gene sets to thrive in almost every corner of the planet Earth, no matter how harsh or fluctuating the environment is.

Biography

Research Interests

My research interests lie on the interface between mathematics and biology, and in particular the application of modern computational modelling to biological topics. I am currently designing and analysing mathematical models of the various stress response pathways in Bacillus subtilis for my PhD in James Locke’s research group at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU).

I am interested in how genetically identical individuals can differ from each other even within a common environment. Such inter-individual variability can be beneficial when future environmental conditions are unpredictable. This phenomenon has been studied in microbes, where variability between genetically identical cells forms the basis for some forms of antibiotic resistance. Here, specific gene regulatory networks appear to have evolved to amplify stochastic molecular fluctuations, creating differences between genetically identical cells.