Chemla Lab

Engineered biology in the wild.

New lab — opening March 1, 2027 at UC Santa Barbara

We work to make engineered biology predictable, observable, and deployable — designing mRNA at the kinetic level, building hyperspectral reporters readable from satellites, and developing the forensic, design, and governance tools that let engineered organisms live responsibly in the real world.

The world around us is alive.

Plants pull carbon from thin air to make our food. Microbes ferment our food and beverages and detoxify our waste. Ocean cyanobacteria produce roughly half the oxygen we breathe. For ten thousand years humans engineered this world by selective breeding, fermentation, and animal husbandry — always by trial and error, always over generations.

We are, for the first time in human history, no longer limited to that method.

We can now precisely design and engineer the DNA, RNA, and proteins of living organisms — reaching into any cell or microbiome with single-base precision and programming behavior at the kinetic level. We can engineer those organisms to report on the environment around them and on their own internal state, with signals readable from a wearable, a drone, or a satellite. And we can release them into the wild, track them across decades, and govern them through the design principles, process engineering, and safety infrastructure we build alongside the science.

This is the design era of biology — and our lab works to study and build the foundational principles for it. This technology can unlock:

Ecosystems, waterways, and built environments that clean and maintain themselves.

Agriculture that needs far less synthetic fertilizer and pesticide, with crops that fix their own nitrogen and defend themselves.

Better food, cleaner water, and breathable air — produced by living systems we designed to be abundant and safe.

Living biosensors reporting from inside our bodies and from the soil, giving early warning for disease, drought, and contamination.

Carbon drawn down by engineered photosynthesis and microbiomes tuned to the climate they live in.

Medicines that manufacture themselves where they are needed, on the timescale of an outbreak rather than a decade.

Applications of engineered biology in the wild — environments, agriculture, health, sensing, and climate

Research

Three themes, one vision

Three indispensable legs of engineered biology in the wild. Each makes the others possible.

Theme 1 · Predictable

Genetic Design: mRNA Engineering

Sequence-to-function rules for mRNA structure, translation, and stability — and the direct kinetic measurements (MIT-seq, CFTseq) that let us design protein levels instead of guessing them.

Theme 2 · Observable

Hyperspectral Biology

Genetically encoded reporters readable from microscope to satellite. Once read-out exists at every scale, every other deployment decision becomes evidence-based.

Theme 3 · Deployable

Engineering × Ecology

Designing engineered organisms that work — and stay accountable — outside the lab. Forensic tracking, design for the wild, and the governance infrastructure to deploy responsibly.

Selected work

Featured papers

Nature Microbiology · 2025

Design and regulation of engineered bacteria for environmental release

Y. Chemla, C. J. Sweeney, C. A. Wozniak, C. A. Voigt

95 citations · Read on Scholar →

Nature Biotechnology · 2026

Hyperspectral reporters for long-distance and wide-area detection of gene expression in living bacteria

Y. Chemla, I. Levin, Y. Fan, A. A. Johnson, C. W. Coley, C. A. Voigt

28 citations · Read on Scholar →

Nature Communications · 2020

A possible universal role for mRNA secondary structure in bacterial translation revealed using a synthetic operon

Y. Chemla, M. Peeri, M. L. Heltberg et al.

25 citations · Read on Scholar →

All publications

Newsroom

Latest news

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Build the design era of biology with us.

The Chemla Lab opens March 1, 2027 at UC Santa Barbara, and we're recruiting our founding members now — postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates — across mRNA biology, hyperspectral imaging, microbial ecology, and computation.