Bacteria represent the most abundant form of life on Earth and have evolved to successfully colonize nearly every environmental niche. In doing so, bacteria predominately form multicellular communities known as biofilms, resulting in increased resilience, persistence, and emergent behaviors. Consequently, biofilms present an attractive target for engineering and synthetic biology,...
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a masterwork of biology, and its development was a key part of the transformation from monocellular to multicellular life. With an ECM, cells acquired the ability to cooperatively build a dynamic support network that facilitated their movement, specialization, and communication. This ECM is a hierarchical...
Tailoring the design of surfaces and interfaces with nanoscale features has the ability to significantly impact biological functions for a swath of applications including drug delivery, structure assembly, and biomedicine. For example, creating spatially defined nanoscale patterns has been known to contribute to changes in cellular architecture and mechanical properties,...
Cellular translation is responsible for the synthesis of proteins, a highly diverse class of macromolecules that form the basis of biological function. In Escherichia coli, harnessing and engineering of the biomolecular components of translation, such as ribosomes, transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, has led to both biotechnology products (i.e.,...
Protein-based biomaterials are widely used in biomedical applications and mechanical support because of their novel structural flexibility, biocompatibility and mechanical properties. Protein-based biomaterials outperform traditional synthetic materials in various environments as traditional materials lack the diverse chemical functionalities that proteins offer. Novel bioinspired techniques such as directed evolution offer the...
Protein-protein interactions are ubiquitous in living systems, and mediate important cellular processes from decision making to immunity against pathogens. Furthermore, protein-protein interactions are key to many protein therapeutics, pathogen diagnostics, and numerous synthetic biology applications. As a result, there has been significant effort to develop methods to express potential protein...
Breakthroughs in large-scale biological data collection have resulted in a wealth of -omics (genomics, metabolomics, etc.) datasets in the literature. However, the development of appropriate computational techniques for their analysis is lacking, yet crucial for fully extracting the rich information contained in these datasets. The work in this dissertation describes...
Advances in methods to sequence and manipulate DNA have enabled systems that enzymatically encode information in cellular DNA in situ. These systems, broadly categorized as molecular recorders, couple signals of interest to the expression of DNA modification enzymes, resulting in signal-dependent changes in DNA sequence. While a variety of molecular...
Three in ten people worldwide lack access to a safely managed source of drinking water, with one in ten lacking access to a drinking water service altogether. This is projected to worsen in the coming years as climate change, infrastructure degradation, and poor governance work to further increase global water...
Ensuring adequate water quality is essential for human health and for effective allocation of resources in agriculture, energy, and manufacturing. However, the current state-of-the-art for water quality testing requires expensive equipment and technical expertise to analyze samples and takes days to obtain results from off-site labs, making it inaccessible to...