Author name: Keith Shearwin

Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Biomedical Science in the School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Sciences and Engineering, University of Adelaide. I have been in an academic research and teaching role since 2005. I have extensive experience in the field of biochemistry, phage biology, microbiology and synthetic biology. I have published >75 peer-reviewed manuscripts including papers in PNAS, Molecular Cell, Cell Reports, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, Genes and Development. My labs primary experimental systems are two E. coli bacteriophages, lambda and 186. These temperate phages can replicate their genomes using alternative developmental pathways, lysis and lysogeny, and are some of the simplest organisms to make developmental decisions. Despite their relative simplicity, the phage systems combine a wide range of gene control mechanisms in complex ways and have many lessons to teach us. Bacteriophage lambda continues to be a key model system for many molecular biological processes; phage 186 is less well characterised but provides a powerful comparison with lambda, as it achieves similar outcomes using different regulatory circuits. The fundamental biochemistry shared by all living things means that the study of any organism, from phages to humans, continues to illuminate universal principles that apply to all organisms. We have developed a series of phage based tools for synthetic biology, including the popular pOSIP series of plasmids, available from Addgene.