Jeff Tabor
Background
- I received my Ph.D. in May 2006 from the University of Texas, studying the design and evolution of Synthetic Biological systems under Andy Ellington.
- I received my B.A. studying Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Texas in 2001. I also studied Evolutionary Biology in the laboratory of Jim Bull for two years during that time.
http://openwetware.org/images/8/81/Jtabor.jpg
Research Interests
Synthetic Biology
I am interested in programming the behaviors of living cells using synthetic genetic circuits.
Bacterial Photography
I was involved with a group that designed a "bacterial photography" system in which a community of E.coli act as a biological film capable of genetically "printing" an image of light. This was accomplished by rewiring an osmo-responsive signal transduction system in E.coli to respond to red light.
If you'd like to take your own bacterial photographs, check out the page on how to build a light cannon.
Edge Detector
We have also used bacterial photography as a platform for the construction of a biological edge detector. In this system, each bacterium in the film determines whether it is located in the light, the dark, or at the boundary of light and dark. Only those who are at a boundary produce a visible black pigment. The result is not a positive of the projected image, but only the outline of the image. Edge detection is a well studied serial algorithm where computation time increases linearly with the number of pixels (approximately as the square of image size). In the massively parallel Biological edge detector, the algorithm runs in constant time regardless of image size. This bottom-up approach highlights the parallel information processing abilities inherent to Biological systems, a feature which is taken advantage of in natural systems such as metazoan development and neural networks.
Publications
- Jeffrey J. Tabor, Eli Groban and Christopher A. Voigt. Performance Characteristics for Sensors and Circuits Used to Program E.coli. In Systems Biology and Biotechnology of E.coli, ed. S.Y.Lee, Springer (In press).
- Jeffrey J. Tabor, Matthew Levy, Zachary B. Simpson and Andrew D. Ellington. Parasitism and protocells: The tragedy of the molecular commons. In Protocells: Bridging Nonliving and Living Matter, eds. S. Rasmussen, M.A. Bedau, L.Chen, D.Deamer, D.C. Krakauer, N. Packer and P.F. Stadler, MIT Press, 11/2008.
- Jeffrey J. Tabor, Travis S. Bayer, Zachary B. Simpson, Matthew Levy and Andrew D. Ellington. Engineering Stochasticity in Gene Expression (2008). Molecular Biosystems, 4 (7) 754-61. pdf
- Matthew Levy, Jeffrey J. Tabor and Stephen Wong. Taking pictures with E.coli: Signal processing using synthetic biology (2006). IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 23 (3), 142-144. pdf
- Jeffrey J. Tabor, Matthew Levy, and Andrew D. Ellington (2006). Deoxyribozymes that recode sequence information. Nucleic Acids Research, 34 (8):2166-2172. pdf
- Jeffrey J. Tabor, Eric A. Davidson and Andrew D. Ellington (2006). Developing RNA tools for engineered regulatory systems. In Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews, ed. S.E. Harding, Intercept, Ltd., 22, 21-44. pdf
- A. Levskaya, A.A. Chevalier, J.J. Tabor, Z.B. Simpson, L.A. Lavery, M.Levy, E.A. Davidson, A.Scouras, A.D. Ellington, E.M. Marcotte, and C.A. Voigt (2005). Engineering Escherichia coli to see light. Nature, 438 (7067), 441-442. pdf
- Jeffrey J. Tabor and Andrew D. Ellington (2003). Playing to Win at DNA computation. Nature Biotechnology, 21(9):1013-5. pdf
Contact
email:
account: jeff.tabor
server: gmail.com
Shipping and mailing address:
Byer's Hall Room 409
1700 4th Street
San Francisco, CA 94158-2330
archive
protocols
other
Synthetic Biology Team Challenge
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