David Summers’ interests include E. coli plasmid biology, bacterial cell cycle control and the bacterial cell
factory. The group has been responsible for the discovery and on-going characterisation of a bacterial cell
cycle checkpoint which delays the division of cells containing multimers of multicopy plasmids. An
application of this work has been the development of a novel bacterial cell factory known as the Quiescent
Cell Expression System. Manipulation of the checkpoint enables the establishment of non-growing but
metabolically active E. coli. These cultures have already been used effectively for recombinant protein
expression. We have now broadened our interests to include the production of alcohols (e.g. butanol) as
well as hydrogen.
