We are an interdisciplinary lab at the interface of genomics, molecular biology, computational biology, electrical engineering, and technology development. We develop computational and high-throughput experimental methods to study the systems biology of microbial organisms and translate the resulting knowledge into biomedical applications including biosensors and wearables.
A lack of biosensors fundamentally limits the application of engineering to biology. Microbes are an enormous and untapped reservoir for portable, inexpensive, and diverse sensing proteins. We have pioneered a platform to identify and isolate microbial sensing proteins for virtually any target analyte. We develop these proteins into electronic sensor devices using a growing technology stack for electrochemical or optical transduction. We are deploying these sensors in a growing range of applications from wearable devices to environmental sensors.
Microbial cells are complex molecular machines that perform sophisticated signal processing and biophysical transformation. We study the molecular networks that govern this behavior. We use high-throughput genomic and computational methods to reconstruct and study the gene regulatory networks that sense and respond to information, and the metabolic networks that manage the flow of energy and material. Our studies have revealed unexpected complexity in gene regulation in bacteria and also insights into biology driven by network processing.
The advent of genomic methods has transformed biology into an information science. This has forced an innovation in computational methods. We develop tools to process large-scale genomic data sets, analyze these data using machine learning and signal processing approaches, and develop algorithms to reconstruct and model molecular systems from the protein to the network level.