Julius FREDENS
Julius FREDENSAssistant Professor
[email protected]

Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
Principal Investigator, NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI)
Associate Investigator, National Centre for Engineering Biology, Singapore

Biography

Julius received his PhD from University of Southern Denmark and conducted his postdoctoral research with Jason Chin at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, UK. Here, Julius pioneered new methods for genome engineering and genetic code compression, resulting in the first E. coli with a synthetic genome and an altered genetic code. In 2021, Julius received the Presidential Young Professorship at National University of Singapore, where his research group focuses on genome engineering of bacteria and bacteriophages.

Professional Appointments

  • Asst Professor, Presidential Young Professorship, Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS 2021 – Present
  • Research Associate, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK 2015 – 2020
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK 2014 – 2021

Education

Ph.D. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark 2014

Research Interest

Synthetic genomics with a focus on novel applications in healthcare and biotechnology.

Current Research Projects

  • LySE: Accelerated evolution of large gene clusters.
  • Engineering of cyanobacteria for carbon-negative bioproduction.
  • Directed evolution of bacteriophages for phage therapy.
  • Living biosensors for biomarker and environmental detection.

Selected Publications

  1. Giaveri S, Abil Z, Kohyama S, Fu M, Levrier A, Adamala K, Chinantuya W, Dekker C, Deng N, Fredens J, Hagino K, Jahnke K, Li X, Lindner AB, Liu C, Majumder S, Noireaux V, Schwille P, and Westensee IN (2025) Building a Synthetic Cell Together. Nature Communications 16:7488
  2. Ong S, Ghode P, Narenderan A, Willenborg F, Eden TV, Lao S, Marsh CO, Yew WS, and Fredens J (2025) Accelerated evolution of whole gene clusters by an engineered lytic phage system in E. coli. bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/2025.04.21.649713
  3. Zürcher JF, Kleefeldt AA, Funke LFH, Birnbaum J, Fredens J, Grazioli S, Liu KC, Spinck M, Petris G, Murat P, Rehm FBH, Sale JE, and Chin JW (2023) Continuous synthesis of E. coli genome sections and Mb-scale human DNA assembly. Nature 619:555-562
  4. Robertson WE, Funke LFH, Torre Ddl, Fredens J, Elliott TS, Spinck M, Christova Y, Cervettini D, Böge F, Liu KC, Buse S, Maslen S, Salmond GPC, Chin JW (2021) Sense codon reassignment enables viral resistance and encoded polymer synthesis. Science 372:1057-1062.
  5. Robertson WE, Funke LFH, Torre Ddl, Fredens J, Wang K, Chin JW (2021) Creating custom synthetic genomes in Escherichia coli with REXER and GENESIS. Nature Protocols 16:2345-2380.
  6. Fredens J, Wang K, Torre Ddl, Funke LFH, Robertson WE, Christova Y, Chia T, Schmied WH, Dunkelmann DL, Beránek V, Uttamapinant C, Llamazares AG, Elliott TS, Chin JW (2019) Total synthesis of Escherichia coli with a recoded genome. Nature 569:514-518.
  7. Wang K, Fredens J, Brunner SF, Kim SH, Chia T, Chin JW (2016) Defining synonymous codon compression schemes by genome recoding. Nature 539:59-64.
  8. Fredens J, Engholm-Keller K, Giessing A, Pultz D, Larsen MR, Højrup P, Møller-Jensen J, Færgeman NJ (2011) Quantitative proteomics by amino acid labeling in C. elegans. Nature Methods 8:845-847.