Center for Harnessing Microbiota from Military Environments (CHARMME)

The Center for Harnessing Microbiota from Military Environments (CHARMME) is a multi-university, basic research project focused on predictive design of engineered cellular systems in defined environments.

Current participants: Manisha Kapasiawala (PhD student, BE) Additional participants:

Collaborators: Dianne Newman (Caltech BBE/GPS) Chris Voigt (MIT) Past participants:

Objectives

Caltech's efforts on focused on development of tools from control and dynamical systems to provide design rules and a computational framework that allows designers to assess robustness of their designs and to evaluate compensation mechanisms designed to enhance robustness. These techniques will build on existing modeling and design tools (BioCRNpyler, Cello, iBioSim, and others), but will integrate representations of biological context to allow distributions of responses to be computed as used as a means of assessing whether a device or circuit will function robustly across chassis and environmental contexts.

References

• Metabolic perturbations to an E. coli-based cell-free system reveal a trade-off between transcription and translation. Manisha Kapasiawala and Richard M. Murray. SEED 2023.

This research is supported by the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies through cooperative agreement W911NF-22-2-0210 from the U.S. Army Research Office. The content of the information on this page does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

Agency: ARO Grant number: W911NF-22-2-0210

Start date: 30 Sep 2022 End date: 29 Sep 2027

Support: 1 graduate student Reporting: Quarterly reports