This Growing Convergence Research project aims at development of the emerging field of Biomolecular Systems Engineering. To accomplish this goal the team incorporates expertise from synthetic biology, protein engineering, process design, control theory and circuit design. The convergence of these disciplines will facilitate a radically new approach toward biological programming and the tools to accomplish these goals.
The focus of the proposed work is to overcome reproducibility issues currently associated with the field of biological engineering by systemic organization and development of: i) engineering workflows, ii) process design tools, iii) curation and validation of standardized parts and iv), undergraduate and graduate pedagogy to advance the field of biological engineering. Successful completion of the proposed work will result in the creation of systematic workflows for the production and reporting of standardized biological unit operations and a new biological design software framework that will enable the production of scalable transcriptional programs, memory structures, and control systems for a variety of biological chassis.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
