BioE Seminar - Advancing optogenetics to address key challenges in synthetic and systems biology

Systems biologists aim to understand how organism-level processes, such as differentiation and multicellular development, are encoded in DNA. Conversely, synthetic biologists aim to program systems-level biological processes, such as engineered tissue growth, by writing artificial DNA sequences. To achieve their goals, these groups have adapted a hierarchical electrical engineering framework that can be applied in the forward direction to design complex biological systems or in the reverse direction to analyze evolved networks. Despite much progress, this framework has been limited by technology: researchers have lacked tools to directly and dynamically characterize biological components inside of living cells.To address this limitation, we have recently developed an all-optical biological ¿function generator and oscilloscope¿ method.