Jee Loon FOO
Jee Loon FOOResearch Assistant Professor
[email protected]

Affiliations

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
Research Cluster Lead, Wilmar-NUS Corporate Laboratory (WIL@NUS)
Principal Investigator, NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI)

Biography

Jee Loon received his Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the Australian National University in 2009. He had postdoctoral training in protein engineering and metabolic engineering at the Nanyang Technological University and the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in the understanding and engineering of biological systems at the interface of chemistry and biology to confer novel functionalities. These include the construction of metabolic pathways in microbes for biosynthesizing valuable biochemicals, and the rewiring of metabolic flux via genome modification and synthetic genomics to alter the properties of organisms. He serves as an Associate Editor for Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts and a reviewer for international journals such as ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, Bioresource Technology, Biotechnology Advances, Current Opinion in Biotechnology and Microbial Cell Factories. 

Education

Ph.D in Biological Chemistry, Australian National University

Research Interest

Metabolic engineering of microbes for bioproduction of valuable chemicals
Protein engineering for novel and improved enzymatic functions for metabolic pathway construction
Synthetic genomics for understanding biological fundamentals

Current Research Projects

  • Metabolic engineering for decarbonisation
  • Transformation of sustainable feedstocks to value-added compounds
  • Synthetic genomics

Selected Publications

  1. Wang, Y., Cao, L., Rong, L., Ding, C., Liu, C., Ye, Q., Huang, Q., Zhang, C.-y., Xu, N., Mao, J. #, Foo, J. L. # & Yu, A#. Compartment engineering in yeast: a path to increased biochemical production. Chem. Eng. J. 524, 169279 (2025).
  2. Gao, H., Song, Y., Jiang, Y., Jiang, W., Guo, F., Yu, Z., Chen, M., Luan, G., Foo, J. L.#, Zhang, W. #, Chang, M. W., Xin, F. # & Jiang, M. Sustainable production through spatial niche partitioning in engineered light-driven microbial community. Metab. Eng. 92, 90 (2025).
  3. Aggarwal, N., Pham, H. L., Ranjan, B., Saini, M., Liang, Y., Hossain, G. S., Ling, H., Foo, J. L. & Chang, M. W. Microbial engineering strategies to utilize waste feedstock for sustainable bioproduction. Nature Reviews Bioengineering 2, 155 (2024).
  4. Heng, Y. C., Kitano, S., Susanto, A. V., Foo, J. L.# & Chang, M. W. Tunable cell differentiation via reprogrammed mating-type switching. Nat Commun 15, 8163 (2024).
  5. Kitano, S., Lin, C., Foo, J. L. & Chang, M. W. Synthetic biology: Learning the way toward high-precision biological design. PLoS Biol. 21, e3002116 (2023).
  6. Zhao, B., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., Lu, Z., Miao, L., Wang, S., Li, Z., Sun, X., Han, Y., He, S., Zhang, Z., Xiao, D., Zhang, C.#, Foo, J. L.#, Wong, A.# & Yu, A.# Biosynthesis of α-bisabolene from low-cost renewable feedstocks by peroxisome engineering and systems metabolic engineering of the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. Green Chem. (2023).
  7. Foo, J. L.*, Kitano, S.*, Susanto, A. V.*, Jin, Z.*, Lin, Y., Luo, Z., Huang, L., Liang, Z., Mitchell, L. A., Yang, K., Wong, A., Cai, Y., Cai, J., Stracquadanio, G., Bader, J. S., Boeke, J. D., Dai, J. & Chang, M. W. Establishing chromosomal design-build-test-learn through a synthetic chromosome and its combinatorial reconfiguration. Cell Genom 3, 100435 (2023).
  8. Zhu, K., Zhao, B., Zhang, Y., Kong, J., Rong, L., Liu, S., Wang, Y., Zhang, C.-y., Xiao, D., Foo, J. L.# & Yu, A.# Mitochondrial Engineering of Yarrowia lipolytica for Sustainable Production of α-Bisabolene from Waste Cooking Oil. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 10, 9644 (2022).
  9. Foo, J. L.*, Rasouliha, B. H.*, Susanto, A. V., Leong, S. S. J. & Chang, M. W. Engineering an Alcohol-Forming Fatty Acyl-CoA Reductase for Aldehyde and Hydrocarbon Biosynthesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Front Bioeng Biotechnol 8, 585935 (2020).
  10. Foo, J. L. & Chang, M. W. Synthetic yeast genome reveals its versatility. Nature 557, 647 (2018).
  11. Foo, J. L.*, Jensen, H. M.*, Dahl, R. H., George, K., Keasling, J. D., Lee, T. S., Leong, S. & Mukhopadhyay, A. Improving microbial biogasoline production in Escherichia coli using tolerance engineering. MBio 5, e01932 (2014).
  12. Foo, J. L. & Leong, S. S. Directed evolution of an E. coli inner membrane transporter for improved efflux of biofuel molecules. Biotechnol. Biofuels 6, 81 (2013).

* Authors contributed equally; # Co-corresponding authors