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BioE Seminar: Engineering and evolving eukaryotic regulatory systems

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Bioengineering Department
Location
2310 Everitt Lab
Date
Apr 9, 2019   11:30 am  
Speaker
Ahmad (Mo) Khalil, assistant professor, Boston University Department of Biomedical Engineering
Views
4

ABSTRACT

Eukaryotic organisms display complex and diverse genetic responses to the environment. It has been proposed that this complexity arises from elaborated regulatory networks, which at a fundamental level enable cells to perform computational functions. How do these core functions emerge from the underlying regulatory circuits, and how do these regulatory systems evolve? To address these broad questions, my lab develops and applies engineering (bottom-up) approaches. In this talk, I will first discuss our efforts to use synthetic biology to study and exploit common, natural design principles of eukaryotic transcriptional systems. Specifically, I will describe platforms we have developed for engineering (1) synthetic transcriptional circuits that use tunable molecular cooperativity to enable complex signal processing behaviors in cells, and (2) synthetic regulatory circuits that read and write a chromatin modification to drive basic epigenetic functions, such as epigenetic memory. Second, I will describe a new continuous culture platform we developed, called eVOLVER, that enables the design of new, automated and high-throughput cell growth experiments to quantify cellular adaptations and to experimentally evolve biological systems in the laboratory.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ahmad (Mo) Khalil is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Founding Associate Director of the Biological Design Center at Boston University. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His research is interested in how molecular circuits enable core cellular functions, such as decision-making, computation and epigenetic memory. His team primarily applies synthetic biology approaches to study and manipulate the function and evolution of these cellular systems. He is recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), NIH New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the Hartwell Foundation Biomedical Research Award. Mo was an HHMI Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. James Collins at Boston University. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT and his B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Stanford University.

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