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Cellular Engineering Group

The Cellular Engineering Group works to provide a foundation of measurement assurance to support the control and rational design of biological function.

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 art synthetic biology, automation, and machine learning, the Group creates living measurement systems, such as cells, engineered to sense and respond in programmed ways. Importantly, building these systems both requires and advances meaningful quantitation of the effects of environmental context and evolution. The Group aims to advance fundamental understanding, improve predictability for design, ensure reproducibility and comparability, and facilitate scalability for real-world applications of engineered biological systems.

Projects and Programs

Measurements for minimal cells

Ongoing
Technologies to manipulate biological systems have far outpaced our ability to design the function of those systems in a predictable way. This is, in part, a

NIST Cell-Free Workshop

Ongoing
The Cell-Free Workshop sought to identify and prioritize actionable steps towards more reproducible and comparable cell-free systems for practical applications