Synthetic biology approaches to new chemistry

Living systems have evolved the capacity to carry out many chemical transformations of interest to synthetic chemistry if they could be redesigned for targeted purposes. However, our ability to mix and match enzymes to construct de novo pathways for the cellular production of small molecule targets is limited by insufficient understanding how chemistry works inside a living cell. Our group is interested in using synthetic biology as a platform to study how enzymes function in vivo and to use this understanding to build new synthetic pathways for the production of pharmaceuticals, nanomaterials, and fuels using living cells.