November 2025: Dr Mark Calcott elected President of Synthetic Biology Australasia
Hot on the heels of a very successful Aus Syn Bio conference at Te Papa in Wellington, Dr Mark Calcott was elected the first NZ-based President of this important international society. Congratulations Mark! Read more about the society here
November 2025: Australia-NZ Natural Products Symposium Prizes for Alex and Sanga
Four poster prizes from three consecutive meetings! Congratulations to Alex Linton-de Boer and Anna Sang for keeping the lab poster train on the tracks, scooping two of the three poster prizes on offer at the recent Aus-NZ Natural Products Symposium. Great effort!
November 2025: Anna Moore takes home poster prize at 2025 NZSBMB, Rotorua
Congratulations to Ackerley lab MSc student, Anna Moore, who took home a poster prize at the 2025 NZSBMB Conference in Rotorua! Anna's prize-winning research explores the discovery and optimisation of new PET-degrading enzymes, supervised by Dr Brown and Prof Ackerley. This is an impressive achievement for her first-ever poster!
November 2025: Prof David Ackerley & Dr Alistair Brown among researchers awarded prestigious Marsden Fund Grants
We are excited to announce that two Ackerley lab research proposals were successful in the 2025 Marsden Fund round! 
Prof David Ackerley has been awarded a Marsden Standard grant ($941,000) for his project titled "Using high-throughput enzyme discovery to train AI for development of novel biocatalysts". This project uses enzyme discovery and engineering to tackle plastic pollution - developing novel biocatalytic solutions to help break down persistent polymers. Alongside Associate Investigators Dr Alistair Brown (VUW) and Assoc. Prof Libusha Kelly (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), this grant will enable the team to considerably advance work on high-throughput enzyme screening, AI-driven design, and biocatalytic solutions. Read more about Dave's project here.
Dr Alistair Brown has been awarded a Marsden Fast-Start grant ($360,000) for his synthetic biology project engineering bacteria to produce the blue pigment indigoidine for the textile and food-colouring industries, replacing unsustainable plant or petrochemical-based dyes. Alistair’s approach (using enzyme screening, gene‐engineering and artificial intelligence) positions him at the forefront of next-generation bio-manufacturing. Alongside his Associate Investigators at Massey University (Assoc. Prof Faith Kane & Angela Kilford), this work positions Alistair and his team at the cutting edge of sustainable bio-manufacturing and colour-tech. Read more about Alistair's project here.
October 2025: Dr Abby Sharrock takes home poster prize at Enzyme Engineering XXVIII, Denmark
Congratulations to Dr Abby Sharrock, who was awarded first place in the poster presentation competition at the 2025 ECI Enzyme Engineering Conference in Helsingor, Denmark! Abby presented her research on the discovery and engineering of chemoresistance enzymes for next-generation cell therapies.
May 2025: Anna Sang - Research for Life Grant Success!
A Research for Life (Wellington Medical Research Foundation) grant crafted by new MSc student Anna Sang was successfully funded, and will fully cover a two-year project to work with Profs David Ackerley and Rachel Codd (University of Sydney) on "Engineering imaging agents to expand function and options in cancer management". Congratulations Sanga!
February 2025: Dr Abby Sharrock among researchers awarded prestigious Marsden Fund Fast-Start Grant
Dr Sharrock was awarded a $360,000 Marden Fund Fast-Start grant to fund her work establishing methods to precisely ablate target cells, enabling researchers worldwide to develop more effective models of degenerative disease. The enzymatic tools resulting from this research will be made available to researchers worldwide to study cellular regeneration, define immune cell subtypes, model several chronic disease conditions through continuous antibiotic exposure, and screen for drugs to treat those and other diseases.
January 2025: Dr Sarah Messenger awarded prestigious EMBO Fellowship
A huge congratulations to Dr Sarah Messenger on being awarded an EMBO Fellowship to work with Dr Serina Robinson at EAWAG/ETH Zurich. Sarah and Serina will be working on the discovery and optimisation of defluorinating enzymes to develop more effective methods of remediating poly-and per-fluorinated "forever compound" pollutants.
August 2024: Dr Abby Sharrock awarded HRC Emerging Researcher Grant
Dr Sharrock is leading innovative research to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies against certain cancers that are currently less responsive to treatment. Supported by this $400,000 value grant her research will focus on making certain immunotherapies compatible with both next-generation and traditional chemotherapies, allowing these approaches to be used together. Dr, Sharrock will combine several methods to find and modify enzymes that can protect immune cells from being damaged by chemotherapy drugs. Her work represents a significant step toward combination cancer treatments to improve patient outcomes.
Read more here: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/science/about/news/science-success-four-university-researchers-receive-hrc-grants
November 2023: Dr Mark Calcott awarded the prestigious Royal Society of NZ Hamilton Award
Continuing a hot month for the NRPS team, Dr Mark Calcott was awarded the prestigious Royal Society of NZ Hamilton Award, recognising an outstanding piece of work from a Early-Career Researcher. The award was based on his overturning of the long-standing dogma that condensation domains routinely exhibit a proof-reading function that prevents effective NRPS engineering by adenylation domain substitution alone. Mark's research has instead identified effective boundaries that are permissive for generation of novel non-ribosomal peptides via adenylation domain substitutions in diverse NRPS systems
Read more about this research here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32917865/
Nature Chemical Biology accepts "Metagenomic domain substitution for the high-throughput modification of non-ribosomal peptides"
Well done Sarah and Mark! On the day before her PhD exam, Sarah's first first-author publication has been published by Nature Chemical Biology (https://rdcu.be/drRnW). In work led by Dr Mark Calcott, she describes how degenerate PCR primers can be applied to amplify thousands of NRPS domains from environmental DNA, for substitution of target NRPS enzymes. Demonstrating this approach, she successfully generated hundreds of functional recombinant enzymatic assembly lines in parallel - far more successful NRPS engineering outcomes than have ever been reported in a single paper.
October 2023: Bioprospecting the unknown
Congratulations to Dr Michelle Rich and her (many!) co-authors for her recent publication describing a new approach that greatly increases the efficiency of discovering "unknown unknown" enzymes that catalyse desirable reactions, encoded within vast reservoirs of environmental DNA. This approach has potential to be a game-changer for discovery of many different kinds of enzyme, from drug resistance to pollution remediating and more.
Read more here: https://theconversation.com/bioprospecting-the-unknown-how-bacterial-enzymes-encoded-by-unknown-genes-might-help-clean-up-pollution-216080
NZ Cancer Society Fellowship awarded to Dr Alistair Brown
An additional congratulations to Dr Alistair Brown on receiving a highly-competitive Cancer Society of NZ postdoctoral fellowship, providing three years of support to establish a platform for developing synthetic biology solutions to producing a next generation of nucleoside analogue chemotherapy drugs.
August 2023: Dr Abby Sharrock receives Illumina Emerging Researcher Award
Dr. Abby Sharrock has been named the recipient of the 2023 illumina™ Emerging Researcher Award. This award is designed jointly by illumina™ and the Queenstown Research Week to recognize and acknowledge an emerging researcher (less than 5 years post-PhD) who uses molecular biology tools in New Zealand. Congrats Abby!
July 2023: Wellington researchers create new mRNA-based malaria vaccine
Congratulations to Dr. Mitch Ganley on his first author publication in Nature Immunology and excellent TV spot on Newshub! Dr Ganley and a team of kiwi scientists have created a new malaria vaccine believed to be a world-first as it could provide long-lasting protection and be used on people who've already been exposed to the disease.
May 2023: HRC Emerging Researcher Grant awarded to Dr Alistair Brown 
Dr. Alistair Brown has been awarded an HRC Emerging Researcher Grant with a value of $250,000. This funding will bolster Dr. Brown's investigation into nucleoside therapeutics. His project aims to create a synthetic biology framework that integrates the exploration and environmentally-friendly generation of new nucleoside analogs, intended to counteract bacterial and viral infections.
To read more about Alistair's project, see https://hrc.govt.nz/resources/research-repository/building-synthetic-biology-pipeline-develop-nucleoside-therapeutics
November 2022: Prestigious Hercus Fellowship awarded to Dr Mark Calcott
A huge congratulations to Ackerley Lab team member Dr. Mark Calcott for being awarded a Sir Charles Hercus Fellowship valued at
$536,377. This funding will be used over the next 48 months to support his research project titled "Large-scale substitution approaches to engineer non-ribosomal peptides".
To read more about research projects funded by the New Zealand Health Research Council, see https://www.hrc.govt.nz/news-
and-events/links-between-active-travel-and-health-be-studied-part-111m-awarded-nz-researchers
July 2022: Maurice Wilkins Centre Flexible Funding grant awarded to Dr Alistair Brown
Congratulations to Ackerley Lab team member Dr. Alistair Brown for his award of a Maurice Wilkins Centre Flexible Funding grant of $25,000. This funding will be used to support his research project titled "Using synthetic biology to access next-generation antiviral and antibiotic nucleoside analogue drug candidates".
June 2022: Inaugural Research for Life Fellowship awarded to Dr Abby Sharrock
Congratulations to Ackerley Lab team member Dr Abby Sharrock for being awarded the inaugural Wellington Medical Research Foundation (Research for Life) Postdoctoral Fellowship. This fellowship will fund Abby for two years and support her research into using bacterial DNA repair enzymes for protection of cell-based gene therapy vectors.
February 2022: 'Unassuming' enzyme opens way for new medical treatments
Prof David Ackerley and his colleagues Dr Abby Sharrock and Dr Elsie Williams have successfully engineered a genetic 'kill switch' that could have important applications in the treatment of cancer. The recently published paper in Nature Methods is co-authored with scientists from Johns Hopkins University.
Read more here: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/research/unassuming-enzyme-opens-way-for-new-medical-treatments
November 2021: It's World Antimicrobial Awareness Week!
World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is celebrated annually to increase global understanding of antimicrobial resistance. This year, the Royal Society of New Zealand highlighted researchers in Aotearoa working to raise awareness on antimicrobial resistance.
To learn more about Professor David Ackerley and his research focus, read the full interview here: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/news/waaw-professor-david-ackerley/
November 2021: A 'moonlighting' challenge to antibiotics
“Moonlighting” enzymes that can make bacteria stronger are becoming a major concern as an increasing number of people around the world turn to antibiotic treatments. Newsroom reports on research that the Ackerley lab is undertaking to investigate how entirely new forms of antibiotic resistance can develop from such moonlighting enzymes.
Read more here: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom/a-moonlighting-challenge-to-antibiotics
September 2020: Research Opens the Way to New Drugs
Research by Ackerley Lab team members at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Biological Sciences dispels the belief that on the assembly line of enzymes there is a “proof-reading” mechanism that ensures molecules are put together in a certain way. This could pave the way to designing improved anti-cancer compounds or drugs that can treat what are currently antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
Read more here: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/news/2020/09/research-opens-the-way-to-new-drugs
August 2019: Marsden Fast-Start Win for Dr Mark Calcott
Congratulations to Ackerley Lab team member Dr Mark Calcott for being awarded a Marsden Fund Fast-Start grant valued at $300,000 for his project titled 'Development of Large-scale Substitution Approaches to Engineer Non-ribosomal Peptide Synthetase Enzymes'!
Read more about Marsden Fund Fast-Start grants here: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/marsden-fast-start/
Outside the Lab
