User:LLavery

Background

I am currently a Senior at The University of Texas at Austin, and I will be graduating in May 2006 with a BS in Biochemistry.

I have been a member of Andy Ellington's lab since May of 2005.

Research

In the time I have been in the Ellington lab, I have been heavily involved with projects in the nascent field of synthetic biology as well as in the development of novel cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.

Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology has emerged as an exciting discipline with much to offer to the study of biology as well as the development of biotechnology. One major push in synthetic biology is to reassemble “parts” (functional genetic elements) from extant biological systems in order to engineer novel cellular behaviors and to gain a better understanding of how natural systems function. I have been involved in several efforts in this field that primarily stem from my involvement in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual synthetic biology competition.

In the summer of 2004, I joined the University of Texas synthetic biology team in MIT’s first intercollegiate competition, SBC 2004. Our team engineered a community of E. coli to function as a film capable of genetically recapitulating a projected light image. To achieve this we collaborated with Christopher Voigt’s Lab at The University of California, San Francisco, which had rewired a light sensing gene from a cyanobacterium to control gene expression in E. coli. Together we were able to create the world’s first “bacterial photograph”. This work was recently published in Nature.