Dr Julius FREDENSAssistant Professor

Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
Principle Investigator, NUS Medicine Synthetic Biology Translational Research Programme

Education and Research

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

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

Research Interest

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

Current Research Projects

  1. Directed evolution of bacteriophage to recognise new targets.
  2. Design and construction of novel bacteriophage genomes.
  3. Stability v.s. speed: Creating bioproduction strains from fast growing cyanobacteria.

Selected Publications

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.