Plant Cell Foundry for Sustainable Protein Ingredients

About the Project

BCSP 2026 PhD Studentship · Dr Karen Sarkisyan

PhD Program Overview

The Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein at Imperial College London, in collaboration with Syntato, is offering a fully funded PhD opportunity focused on building a plant cell foundry for sustainable protein ingredients. Plant hosts have an unusually direct route to scale, since scale-up can mean growing more plants and processing them through existing agricultural infrastructure rather than building large production facilities, but plant host optimisation is not yet a routine part of industry’s typical R&D pipeline.

This PhD will build a crop-cell foundry for the Bezos Centre: a small collection of food-relevant suspension cell lines, paired with a rapid plant-cell testing system, to ask a practical question: when a new ingredient design arrives, which plant host should we try first, and what DNA design makes it work? The student will establish cell lines from potato and selected major crops and use them to systematically compare crops as production hosts and genetic designs for protein production, using representative food ingredients including sweet proteins, a growth factor for cultivated-meat media, and a small-molecule biosynthesis pathway. The output will be a unique reusable platform and screening service open to Centre labs and startups to prototype plant-made ingredients early, cheaply and with realistic bioprocess constraints.

Research Focus

• Establishment of food-relevant crop cell lines
• Comparative DNA design across plant hosts
• Predictive scale-down bioprocessing
• Centre-facing screening platform
• AI Scientist: using and further developing Syntato’s AI co-scientist capabilities