Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This proposal envisions a humanoid robot as a supervised autonomous assistant that will support caregivers in early diagnosis and improve the treatment of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) associated with Intellectual Disability (ID). The robot can be part of the diagnostic team during the administration of the psycho-diagnostic tests in order to enrich the data that the psychologist can use to refine the diagnosis, helping them to distinguish among the ASD and ID levels. The robot can autonomously carry out routine rehabilitation activities that don’t need particular attention by the human therapist, who can, therefore, focus on other subjects that need more care. The robot will always remain under the ultimate control of the caregiver who can use the robot’s sensors streaming to monitor the child and intervene when needed. The proposal presents a research program that will introduce three main innovations: (i) an unique set of use cases in which a sociall assistive robot gives support to the diagnosis and rehabilitation of ASD and ID; (ii) implementation of novel control strategies for autonomous and safe robot-child interaction that can support the intelligent personalization of activities and overcome problems of the “Wizard of Oz” (WoZ) approach in practical applications; (iii) An user-centred design of the use cases that facilitates the direct integration of the robot in everyday activities and standard therapeutic protocols. The final output of the research project will be a complete set of use cases that will be empirically validated via pilot studies and small-scale trials in school, family and clinical environments. Furthermore, the proposal enlists a series of actions for the widespread scientific dissemination of the experimental results and outreach activities to give evidence also to the general public of the actual opportunities offered by robot and, thus, increase their acceptance and willingness to use robots in the care of ASD and ID.

Methane oxidising bacteria are very important in the environment since they are a key link in the global biogeochemical methane cycle and oxidise methane in many environments such as wetlands, paddy field soils and landfills before this methane is released into the environment. They thereby mitigating the effects of this potent greenhouse gas and reduce global warming. Methane monooxygenase (MMO) is a bacterial enzyme that catalyses the first step in methane oxidation by bacteria. It is of great interest to chemists because it oxidises methane to methanol at ambient temperatures and pressures, a reaction normally requiring high temperatures and pressures and expensive catalysts. MMO is very unusual in that it will also oxidise very many other alkanes, alkenes and aromatic compounds and their substituted derivatives and therefore it has great potential for use as a biocatalyst in biotransformations and bioremediation in 'green chemistry' reactions that are less polluting than traditional chemical routes. The structure of MMO has been the subject of considerable interest for biologists because of this broad substrate specificity and one aim has been to try to understand how the structure of the enzyme allows the catalysis of such a wide range of compounds and how changing its structure by mutagenesis, forced evolution or construction of mutant and hybrid enzymes will alter its catalytic utility. This is an ambitious grant proposal from world experts in the molecular biology and biochemistry of MMO. We propose to construct key mutants in the active site of MMO and to examine the effects on catalysis of key substrates and to manipulate this enzyme in order to be able to define the pathway of entry of substrates into the active site and to generate novel recombinant enzymes which are able to oxidise new substrates. We also aim to define how the different components of the enzyme interact with each other and how the mechanisms of substrate entry and electron transfer pathways to the site of oxidation in MMO are carried out. In a novel approach, we also wish to carry out 'gene mining' from the environment to capture DNA sequences that encode MMO or related di-iron centre monooxygenases in order to be able to construct new and exciting biocatalysts. This will involve the use of a technique called DNA-Stable Isotope Probing (DNA-SIP) which we originally developed in order to be able to define the population structure of active methane oxidising bacteria in the environment. This involves feeding 13C-substrates such as methane to bacteria contained within environmental samples such as soils. Only the active methanotrophs with MMO will be labelled with this heavy stable isotope. We can then isolate the heavy DNA (containing the whole genomes of methanotrophs and related bacteria) encoding MMO and its relatives from all of the DNA from the thousands of non-methanotrophic bacteria present in soil by density gradient centrifugation. By use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), we can then isolate novel MMO sequences from previously uncultivated bacteria which can subsequently be stitched into plasmids that we have developed which allow us to recreate novel MMOs with unusual biocatalytic properties. Analysis of these recombinant enzymes will shed light on the mechanism of action of MMO and also generate new and novel biocatalysts with potential for use in industry in non-polluting biotransformation reactions.