Cell Factories

We explore organisms with interesting and desirable biosynthetic capacity and engineer them to produce useful compounds like fuels, medicines, and materials. We treat cells as chemical factories and apply metabolic engineering to rewire biosynthesis — combining gene knockouts, overexpressions, and combinatorial approaches to test many expression configurations in parallel.

• Metabolic engineering of nonconventional yeasts
• Combinatorial metabolic engineering
• Biofuels, biomaterials, and natural products

Biosensors

Biological systems have an incredible capacity to sense and respond to their environment. We design genetic systems that detect and report desired information. We develop biosensors through direct part transfer, inference using homology, and derivation from transcriptomics data.

• Genetic sensor design and optimization
• Transcriptomics-guided biosensor development
• Applications in diagnostics and environmental monitoring