Principal Investigator Barbara Imperiali
In collaboration with Professor Dane Wittrup in MIT’s Chemical Engineering Department we leverage directed evolution in yeast-surface display to engineer protein scaffolds that bind to disease-relevant biomarkers. The evolved scaffolds, including fibronectin (FN3) or a DNA-binding protein (Sso7d), with desirable ligand-binding properties can be armed with solvatochromic dyes to enable reagentless sensing. These sensors be valuable for reporting and quantitation of diverse analytes including cytokines and other cancer-related biomarkers.