Christopher A. Voigt, Ph.D.

The MIT Center for Integrative Synthetic Biology, under the leadership of director Ron Weiss and co-director Christopher Voigt, has been awarded a $11.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The five-year P50 grants, awarded by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, support research for disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention at centers with multi-investigator, interdisciplinary teams. The grant awarded to MIT’s synthetic biology center, headquartered in the Department of Biological Engineering, will enable systems and synthetic biologists to help advance health-related applications that would otherwise be difficult to achieve through solely independent investigator-led research efforts.

Center investigators include eight MIT faculty who will focus on three medically relevant research subjects positioned at the intersection of systems biology and synthetic biology: cancer therapy, artificial tissue homeostasis for beta cells, and infectious disease.

Using genes as interchangeable parts, synthetic biologists design cellular circuits that can perform new functions, such as sensing environmental conditions. However, the complexity that can be achieved in such circuits has been limited by a critical bottleneck: the difficulty in assembling genetic components that don’t interfere with each other.

Unlike electronic circuits on a silicon chip, biological circuits inside a cell cannot be physically isolated from one another. “The cell is sort of a burrito. It has everything mixed together,” says Christopher Voigt, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT. Because all the cellular machinery for reading genes and synthesizing proteins is jumbled together, researchers have to be careful that proteins that control one part of their synthetic circuit don’t hinder other parts of the circuit.

Voigt and his students have now developed circuit components that don’t interfere with one another, allowing them to produce the most complex synthetic circuit ever built. The circuit, described in the Oct. 7 issue of Nature, integrates four sensors for different molecules. Such circuits could be used in cells to precisely monitor their environments and respond appropriately.

Scientists at UC San Francisco are hoping to revolutionize medicine with bacteria notorious for causing food poisoning.

They are engineering e-coli bacteria to behave in a way that will one day allow living cells to be programmed to act logically, just like a computer. Imagine if the intelligence of a super computer could be applied to the building blocks of life.

“What we’re trying to do, is to be able to program a living cell in the same way that you would program a robot or program a computer,” explains UCSF association professor Christopher Voigt.

Synthetic biologists are learning to program cells to behave in a way that may lead to better bio-fuels and medicines that are activated only when they sense disease.

Genetically modified microbes could perform many useful jobs, from making biofuels and drugs, to cleaning up toxic waste. But designing the complex biochemical pathways inside such microbes is a time-consuming process of trial and error.

Christopher Voigt, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, hopes to change that with software that automates the creation of “genetic circuits” in microbes. These circuits are the pathways of genes, proteins, and other biomolecules that the cells use to perform a particular task, such as breaking down sugar and turning it into fuel. Voigt and colleagues have so far made basic circuit components in E. coli. They are working with the large California biotechnology company Life Technologies to develop software that would let bioengineers design complete genetic circuits more easily.