Labs in the Department of Biomedical Engineering

The goal of my laboratory is to develop synthetic gene circuits (small constructs built from genes and their regulatory regions), and use them for biological discovery and practical applications (such as therapeutic gene expression control). For example, using synthetic gene circuits in yeast cells, we could demonstrate that noise (nongenetic cellular diversity) can aid microbial survival during antibiotic treatment and thereby enable the development of drug resistance. We have designed "linearizer" gene circuits in yeast cells that can tune a protein's level precisely, such that the protein concentration is proportional to an extracellular inducer and uniform within a cell population. We have moved this synthetic gene circuit into mammalian cells and can now tune the expression of a cancer-related genes precisely, to investigate how the level of tumor progression-related proteins affects invasion, migration and other metastasis-related cell behaviors. In the future, similar gene circuits may enable novel approaches to gene therapy. Our research is inherently interdisciplinary, since we use mathematical and computational models in combination with single-cell level measurements to characterize the dynamics of synthetic and natural gene networks, and to understand the cellular and multicellular behaviors they confer.