Paul Hudson

Carbon dioxide plays a pivotal role in Earth’s vegetation and is also an important greenhouse gas. In his research, Hudson looks at biological ways of fixing and converting carbon dioxide. This is usually studied through bacteria’s photosynthesis, the process by which organisms use sunlight and then store the energy, but also by studying bacteria that metabolise hydrogen gas, and also in plants.

In his work, Paul uses the infrastructure at SciLifeLab, Science for Life Laboratory, which is normally used in medical research.

The ultimate goal of his research is to accelerate the conversion of carbon dioxide by engineering the metabolic pathways. There are several approaches to achieving this, one of which is to introduce new, less energy-intensive pathways for converting carbon dioxide into usable chemicals. Attempting to uncover how metabolic pathways are regulated is another approach, and creating new synthetic enzymes is a third.

All of the approaches encompass the application of genome editing, systems biology and computational metabolic modelling.