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Material Measurement Laboratory / Biosystems and Biomaterials Division

Cellular Engineering Group

Projects/Programs

Displaying 1 - 14 of 14
Genetic codes

Biosecurity for Synthetic Nucleic Acid Sequences

Ongoing
Emerging biotechnology, enabled by the ability to genetically engineer biological systems similar to the way we write software and program computers, can provide solutions to many pressing societal needs related to health, food security, supply chain resilience, and job growth for economic and
Map of the world with the engineering biology topics covered in Americas, Europe, and Asia meetings

Engineering Biology Metrics and Technical Standards for the Global Bioeconomy

Ongoing
Stakeholders from the Americas, Asia and Australia, and Europe and Africa, came together through a series of regional workshops in Washington D.C., Singapore, and Brussels, respectively, to identify specific areas for development, both technical and non-technical towards continued scale-up and economic growth across the bioeconomy.

Engineering Living Measurement Systems to Sense PFAS

Ongoing
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS, are thermodynamically stable organic fluorinated chemicals that are resistant to traditional degradation pathways leading to concern for bioaccumulation. These compounds originate from several industrial manufacturing processes and are found in soil systems
GPCR

Engineering of G Protein-Coupled Receptors

Ongoing
A trait of all life is the ability to sense and respond to changing environments, and the largest family of eukaryotic proteins that sense and respond to extracellular signals are called G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). In humans, over 800 GPCRs detect a wide range of biological and chemical
Microfluidic diffusive chemostat

Measurements for minimal cells

Ongoing
Minimal cells are cells whose genome has been stripped of all but those genes essential for replication, in a process called "genome minimization." NIST and collaborators demonstrated genome minimization coupled to single cell imaging as a powerful approach to investigate the minimal genetic
Absolute quantitation of mRNA molecules in bacterial cells

Methods for Absolute Quantitation of Transcription

Ongoing
The ability to engineer novel, useful functions into microbial cells for manufacturing or therapeutic applications has accelerated rapidly over the last few decades. However, the measurements required to underpin predictive engineering of these systems are typically not comparable across different
Gears illustrating NIST's cell-free systems initiatives

Metrology For Cell-Free Expression Systems

Ongoing
Cell-free expression systems are poised to advance the US bioeconomy and play a key role in ensuring US manufacturing resilience. NIST has several, on-going projects in its growing portfolio to promote reproducibility, new measurement methods, and best practices and standards in cell-free expression
NIST Foundry for Living Measurement Systems

NIST Living Measurement Systems Foundry

Ongoing
To enable the production of high-throughput, high-quality data that meets the rapidly evolving needs of current and future stakeholders, NIST has established an automation facility for the growth, manipulation, sample preparation, and measurement of engineered microbes. The core of the facility
Test tube illustrating NIST cell-free workshop topics

NIST Workshops on Cell-Free Expression Systems

Completed
NIST has co-hosted two cell-free workshops. NIST CELL-FREE (Comparable Engineered Living Lysates For Research Education and Entrepreneurship) Workshop (2019) The NIST CELL-FREE workshop took place in La Jolla, CA in February 2019, in collaboration with the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). The
ctRSD toolkit overview

RNA Computation and Metrology for Engineering Biology

Ongoing
RNA computation RNA computation, i.e., programmed interactions between RNA molecules that process information, is an increasingly useful synthetic biology tool with applications spanning in vitro biosensing, synthetic cells, and cellular control. We have developed cotranscriptionally encoded RNA

Synthetic Biology

Ongoing
New measurement methods and tools are required for biology to emerge fully as an enabling, practical platform for engineering. The Cellular Engineering Group works to provide a foundation of measurement assurance to support the control and rational design of biological function. Through state of the