Harnessing Evolution

Biological engineering is challenging because evolved systems are more complex than those designed by humans. As a rule, there are many more interactions between biological molecules than there are between the components of human technologies such as microprocessors, which are universally designed for simplicity and modularity. This complexity severely limits the effectiveness of engineering approaches based on rational design.

By learning to evolve biological systems to acquire and optimize useful characteristics, our creations can approach< the remarkable effectiveness of natural living systems.

Projects in this area seek to apply and develop new evolutionary engineering approaches< to accelerate the discovery of new biotechnologies and improve our control over natural and synthetic biological systems.

We can use many different directed evolution methods depending on the problem of interest, including the phage-assisted continuous evolution system (PACE).