Jim Collins Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Honor followed by grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation By Amy Laskowski Jim...
Ahmad S. Khalil, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
M.S., Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Phone: (617) 358-6957
Office: SLB 206; Office hours: By appointment
Email: akhalil@bu.edu
Research Interests
Synthetic biology; systems biology; programmable microfluidics; transcription regulation; mechanobiology; single-cell analysis; single-molecule biophysics.
Current Research
Cells are more than just isolated sacks of biochemical reactions. They sense, feel, and understand their environment, and correspondingly respond to changes in the environment by directing sophisticated behaviors, such as growth and differentiation. These decisions are made by complex networks of interacting genes and proteins.
We are interested in understanding how this internal circuitry, operating together with or in the context of complex external microenvironments, is able to program the remarkable cellular behaviors that are essential to biological systems. To do so, we take an engineering approach, where we construct and recapitulate cellular behaviors from well-understood components. Specifically, we use synthetic biology approaches to construct genetic and protein circuits that implement computation, dynamics, and signal processing within cells. We use programmable microfluidics to reconstitute the cellular microenvironment, with precise spatio-temporal control over its composition. Jointly, we use these efforts to relate the architectures of cellular networks and microenvironment to resulting functions and behaviors. Additionally, we harness these design principles to program entirely new biological functions and ways of ‘talking to cells’ for a range of biotechnological and industrial applications.
Selected Recent Publications
Khalil AS, Lu TK, Bashor CJ, Ramirez CL, Pyenson NC, Joung JK, and Collins JJ. “A Synthetic Biology Framework for Programming Eukaryotic Transcription Functions” Cell. (In press)
Vega NM, Allison KR, Khalil AS, and Collins JJ. “Signaling-Mediated Bacterial Persister Formation” Nature Chemical Biology. 8: 431-433. (2012)
Khalil AS and Collins JJ. “Synthetic Biology: Applications Come of Age” Nature Reviews Genetics. 11: 367-370. (2010)
Borenstein JT, Tupper MM, Mack PJ, Weinberg EJ, Khalil AS, Hsiao J, and Garcia-Cardena G. “Functionalized Endothelialized Microvascular Networks with Circular Cross Sections in a Tissue Culture Substrate” Biomedical Microdevices. 12: 71-79. (2010)
Lu TK, Khalil AS, and Collins JJ. “Next-Generation Synthetic Gene Networks” Nature Biotechnology. 27: 1139-1150. (2009)
Khalil AS, Appleyard DC, Labno AK, Georges A, Karplus M, Belcher AM, Hwang W, and Lang MJ. “Kinesin’s Cover-Neck Bundle Folds Forward to Generate Force” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 105: 19247-19232. (2008)
Khalil AS, Ferrer JM, Brau RR, Kottmann ST, Noren CJ, Lang MJ, and Belcher AM. “Single M13 Bacteriophage Tethering and Stretching” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 104: 4892-4897. (2007)