User:Simon C. Baker

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Contact Info

Simon C. Baker (an artistic interpretation)

• Simon C. Baker
• Oxford Brookes University
• Gypsy Lane
• Oxford
• England
• Email me through OpenWetWare

I lead the BioProcess Research Group at the School of Life Sciences. I learned about OpenWetWare via word of blog, and I've joined to allow public dissemination of results generated from a multi-centre project.

Education

• 1991, PhD, University of Warwick, UK
• 1988, BSc, University of Reading

Research interests

1. Biosurfactants At the moment we have active multidisciplinary research projects looking at new fermentation systems that generate large amounts of biosurfactant by a method known as foam fractionation
2. Enzymology Currently we are looking at nucleic acid enzymology in non-aqueous systems, but in the past have explored the mutagenic space of enzymes such as nitrilase
3. Collaborators Until his untimely death in March 2008, we were proud to collaborate with one of the better UK organic chemists, Dr David Kelly[1].

A few of our publications

1. Kelly DR, Baker SC, King DS, de Silva DS, Lord G, and Taylor JP. Studies of nitrile oxide cycloadditions, and the phenolic oxidative coupling of vanillin aldoxime by Geobacillus sp. DDS012 from Italian rye grass silage. Org Biomol Chem. 2008 Feb 21;6(4):787-96. DOI:10.1039/b716915a |

   Our last paper on nitriles

2. Chen CY, Baker SC, and Darton RC. The application of a high throughput analysis method for the screening of potential biosurfactants from natural sources. J Microbiol Methods. 2007 Sep;70(3):503-10. DOI:10.1016/j.mimet.2007.06.006 |

   The latest paper on surfactin

3. Holmes AJ, Kelly DP, Baker SC, Thompson AS, De Marco P, Kenna EM, and Murrell JC. Methylosulfonomonas methylovora gen. nov., sp. nov., and Marinosulfonomonas methylotropha gen. nov., sp. nov.: novel methylotrophs able to grow on methanesulfonic acid. Arch Microbiol. 1997 Jan;167(1):46-53. DOI:10.1007/s002030050415 |

   PhD work on methane sulphonate metabolism

4. van der Valk AM, Howbrook DN, O'Shaughnessy MC, Sarker DK, Baker SC, Louwrier A, and Lloyd AW. Methods to quantify the biotin-binding capacity of streptavidin-coated polypropylene PCR plates. Biotechnol Lett. 2003 Aug;25(16):1325-8. DOI:10.1023/a:1024951322955 |

   Enzymology meets plastics formulation!

5. Howbrook DN, van der Valk AM, O'Shaughnessy MC, Sarker DK, Baker SC, and Lloyd AW. Developments in microarray technologies. Drug Discov Today. 2003 Jul 15;8(14):642-51. DOI:10.1016/s1359-6446(03)02773-9 |

   Review article

6. ISBN:0415390885

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