Speaker
Description
Many societal challenges, including the diagnosis and treatment of disease, can be tackled by harnessing the unique capabilities of biology. A key goal in biomedical engineering is to improve human health via personalized biomedicine, which promises targeted treatment guided by the patient's physiology. To this end, I work to engineer and build programmable biological systems for autonomous sensing, decision-making, and response in living organisms, combining experimental validation with formal computational methods for the specification, compilation, and verification of designs. In this talk, I will outline some of my contributions, focusing on the use of heterochiral DNA, which combines both naturally occurring D-DNA and chiral mirror image L-DNA, to build robust nanodevices for sensing and decision-making in the harsh environment of a living cell. My work has shown that DNA strand displacement reactions can be used to translate nucleic acid signals between chiralities \cite{LakinMR:robhsd}, and that L-DNA can be used to protect D-DNA molecular components from degradation in biological environments \cite{LakinMR:prohdn,LakinMR:degilh}. I will also discuss some preliminary work on the transfection of heterochiral components into living mammalian cells \cite{LakinMR:hetmer}.
Bibliography
@Article{LakinMR:robhsd,
author = {Tracy L. Mallette and Milan N. Stojanovic and Darko Stefanovic and Matthew R. Lakin},
title = {Robust heterochiral strand displacement using leakless translators},
journal = {ACS Synthetic Biology},
year = {2020},
volume = {9},
number = {7},
pages = {1907--1910},
doi = {10.1021/acssynbio.0c00131}
}
@Article{LakinMR:prohdn,
author = {Tracy L. Mallette and Matthew R. Lakin},
title = {Protecting heterochiral {DNA} nanostructures against exo-nuclease-mediated degradation},
journal = {ACS Synthetic Biology},
year = {2022},
volume = {11},
number = {7},
pages = {2222--2228},
doi = {10.1021/acssynbio.2c00105}
}
@Article{LakinMR:hetmer,
author = {Tracy L. Mallette and Diane S. Lidke and Matthew R. Lakin},
title = {Heterochiral modifications enhance robustness and function of {DNA} in living human cells},
journal = {{C}hem{B}io{C}hem},
year = {2024},
volume = {25},
number = {5},
pages = {e202300755},
doi = {10.1002/cbic.202300755}
}
@Article{LakinMR:degilh,
author = {Tracy L. Mallette and Anshika Mishra and Matthew R. Lakin},
title = {On degradation-induced leak in heterochiral {DNA} strand displacement cascades},
journal = {ACS Synthetic Biology},
year = {2026},
volume = {15},
number = {2},
pages = {599--609},
doi = {10.1021/acssynbio.5c00680}
}
