[IEEE-bhpjobs] Wednesday, September 14, 2005.11:00am -12noon

[Walter Heger]

Seminar Series is returning and
will
have its first event on Wednesday, September 14, 2005.
The series has different time and location -   All seminars are now
held
from 11:00am -12noon in the CIEMAS Fitzpatrick Auditorium A.
Our first speaker is Dr. Lingchong You -  Duke University, Dept. of
Biomedical Engineering.
Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy
Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
Seminar Series
Wednesday, September 14, 2005, 11:00am
(CIEMAS Fitzpatrick Auditorium A)
Lingchong You,PhD

Duke University, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy
“Designer Cells: What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand”
In this talk, I will introduce the burgeoning field of Synthetic Biology, 
which focuses on de novo engineering of gene circuits with well-defined 
function. Recent efforts in Synthetic Biology have generated exciting 
results and insights, highlighting its potential to impact broad areas 
including computation, engineering, and medicine. However, they also reveal 
substantial challenges. In particular, it remains difficult to program 
robust cellular behavior due to ‘noise’ in gene expression and cell-to-cell 
variation in phenotype. We address these issues by using cell-cell 
communication to coordinate cellular behavior across the population. As a 
prototype example, we have built and characterized a ‘population controller’ 
in bacterium Escherichia coli. This circuit autonomously controls cell 
density by regulating the death rate using a quorum sensing module. Upon 
activation, the circuit led to stable steady states or sustained 
oscillations in cell density, as predicted by mathematical modeling. Further 
exploiting this design strategy, we have recently constructed a ‘synthetic 
predator-prey ecosystem’, where two E. coli populations regulate each 
other’s growth and death by engineered two-way communication. Systems such 
as this will enable us to explore complex ecological dynamics in a 
well-defined experimental framework.

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