FURI | Fall 2021

Engineering of Light-Based Promoters with PACE and eVOLVER Continuous Culture Hardware

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Phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) is a revolutionary new method to rapidly engineer new genes and proteins, but the method requires extensive automation and expensive chemical inducers for precise control of gene expression. The researcher is developing an advanced method of synthetic gene regulation for process control, using optogenetics. By integrating light-based gene circuits with custom hardware for directed evolution, optogenetics allows for precise fine-tuning of PACE for versatile and scalable applications.