Biodesign based on engineering principles
At the NUS Engineering Biology Lab, we apply engineering principles to design and build microbes with useful capabilities for medical and industrial applications, developing foundational platform tools to accelerate the design and engineering of the microbes.
Optogenetics
We aim to control bacterial behavior with high spatial and temporal resolution using electromagnetic signals.
Biosensors
We aim to develop biosensors that, incorporated into our engineered cells, allow them to react to different external stimuli.
Modeling and software tools
We aim to develop computational tools to reproduce cell behavior to make engineering-based biode.
Biomanufacturing
We aim to engineer microbial cell factories that enable production of value-added chemicals and proteins.
Biofilm engineering
We aim to control biofilm development in order to obtain scalable, cost-effective bioproduction systems.
Diagnostics and Therapeutics
We aim to use engineered bacteria to fight potentially deadly infectious diseases such as cholera.
The Engineering Biology Lab at NUS focuses on Synthetic Biology to address challenges in different areas including healthcare and environment. We apply engineering principles to design and build microbes with useful capabilities for medical and industrial applications and developing foundational platform tools to accelerate the design and engineering of the microbes. This includes synthetic gene circuits design and automation, modelling of biological systems, and computer aided design tools for SynBio. We have been “reprogramming” microbes to tackle metabolic diseases, to fight infectious causing pathogen and to control biofilm formation. Our motivation is to make engineering of biology more efficient and predictive so that we can scale complexity in order to create novel solutions to tackle global challenges.
