James M Carothers
University of Washington, USA
Title: Designable RNA architectures for rapidly engineering and analyzing synthetic metabolisms
Biography
Biography: James M Carothers
Abstract
Programmable RNA devices and systems can be engineered for applications in biosensing, information processing and dynamic genetic control. In principle, by combining advanced computational simulations with massively-scaled experimental analysis we investigate the limits of RNA device and system design and engineer synthetic metabolisms to produce medically and industrially-important materials. Here, I will present results using new designable molecular architectures for engineering ultrasensitive RNA aptamer nanosensors as technologies for parallelized metabolic output profiling, a novel class of riboswitch-aptazymes as dynamic metabolite-responsive feedback controllers and programmable guide RNA (gRNA) expression platforms for implementing complex CRISPR-dCas9-based transcriptional networks.