Systems and Synthetic Biology: tools to enable reading, editing and writing genomes
with Nanette Boyle, Ph.D.
Chemical & Biological Engineering
University of Colorado, Boulder
Thursday, February 14, 2013
10 a.m.
ERC 490
View seminar flier
abstract: Advances in technology have greatly enhanced the fields of biology and cellular networks; and the ability to rapidly sequence and synthesize DNA has opened up the field of synthetic biology. To synthesize new genetic parts, it is necessary to catalog the parts currently available in the genome. Systems biology focuses on the interactions between components of biological systems and how they interact to determine the phenotype of the cell. In this talk, Boyle will describe her past work in the field of systems biology, particularly metabolic modeling and transcriptomics and how these tools can be used to predict and measure phenotypic changes in the cell. Once the list of parts has been created using systems biology, researchers can start to edit, revise and write genomes in order to introduce complex traits and produce molecules of interest. A major challenge in this field is how to introduce numerous changes simultaneously over the entire genome. To minimize the time required to develop new production strains, Boyle has developed a strain of E. coli which facilitates efficient multiplex recombineering of targets around the genome.
biosketch: Nanette Boyle received her B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from Arizona State University in 2004. She obtained a Ph.D. from Purdue University where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. During her Ph.D., she spent 6 months at TU Delft in the Netherlands as a visiting scholar in Sef Heijnen’s group. Following graduation in 2009, she joined the Biochemistry Department at UCLA as a postdoctoral scholar in Sabeeha Merchant’s group. In 2011, she moved to CU Boulder and joined Ryan Gill’s group where she is currently a postdoctoral scholar.
