Taking synthetic biology beyond the lab

Synthetic biology has reached the point where it can do extraordinary things in a tube — but moving its tools into the real, messy world is still a grand challenge. Engineered organisms have to function in soil, water, plants, and people; they have to be readable from the field, not just from a confocal scope; and they have to be deployed responsibly under regulatory frameworks the field is still actively defining.

Our lab works at this frontier — building the molecular tools, the readouts, and the design and deployment principles needed to make synthetic biology work outside the lab.

To meet that challenge, we focus on three interlocking research areas.