Julius Lucks: Programming cell-free synthetic biology diagnostics with RNA/DNA nanotechnologies

Julius Lucks' talk at the workshop on nucleic acids, synthetic biology and artificial life: www.imperial.a...
Poor water quality affects over two billion people across the globe. While we can’t often see or taste water contaminants, molecular machinery can. Here I will present our latest research on developing a ‘pregnancy test for water’ - a cheap, fast and reliable approach that allows anyone, anywhere to detect if their water is contaminated. Our approach builds off of advances in cell-free synthetic biology - extracting the machinery of natural organisms to perform their functions but in test tube reactions instead of living cells. Using the principles of synthetic biology, we can ‘rewire’ natural biosensors to produce visible signals when specific contaminants are present in a water sample. The addition of synthetic RNA genetic circuits optimizes these reactions to detect contaminants with high degrees of sensitivity and specificity. We have also expanded this platform by creating an interface with toe-hold mediated strand displacement circuits, a dynamic DNA nanotechnology that enables molecular computation through programmable interactions between nucleic acid strands. This work is creating a new application area for cell free synthetic biology and nucleic acid molecular programming that promises to increase the scale at which we can monitor the health of ourselves and our environment.

[@alexrios4036]

RF image was so cool!