Thomas Knight Jr
BiographyResearch in Computational and Systems Biology The Knight lab is developing an engineering technology based on biology. The manufacture of complex structures at the atomic scale requires a fundamental change in approach ââ¬â a shift from physical to chemical processes. Taking effective engineering control over biochemistry allows us to engineer complex atomic level structures with a precision unmatched by any lithographic technology. We believe this capability is the key to cost effective nanoscale fabrication, becoming the dominant manufacturing technology of this century. Engineering biological systems requires a fundamentally different viewpoint from the science of biology. Key engineering principles of modularity, simplicity, separation of concerns, abstraction, flexibility, hierarchical design, isolation, and standardization are of critical importance. The essence of engineering is the ability to imagine, design, model, build, and characterize novel systems to achieve specific goals. Current tools and components for these tasks are primitive. Our approach is to create standard biological parts, assembly techniques, and measurement techniques. The MIT registry of standard biological parts, in collaboration with the Endy Lab, is a growing collection of DNA snippets containing transcriptional promoters, terminators, protein coding sequences, and specialized components in characterized, documented, and assembly-ready form (parts.syntheticbiology.org). Using these parts, we design, build, and test functional biological systems. To function, these components must be incorporated into a working biological system ââ¬â a living cell. For most of our current research, this cell is the E. coli K-12 bacterium. With four thousand genes, this cell is by far the most complex portion of the system. Another laboratory effort is a long range project to engineer a simpler chassis and power supply for our systems. We have chosen the simple bacterium Mesoplasma florum as a starting point for this process on the basis of safety, fast growth, and small genome size. We have sequenced the organism in collaboration with the Whitehead Institute, annotated the sequence, and are now working on the reduction and standardization of its genome to perhaps 400 genes, creating a simple, manageable, understandable basis for engineering life. |
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