We develop and deploy methods in computational protein design for applications in synthetic biology and cellular engineering. Recent advances in machine learning and AI have greatly augmented our abilities to understand, engineer and design biomolecules, in particular proteins. These tools can now be used to gain structural insights (e.g. AlphaFold), and to design new proteins from scratch. Molecular characteristics such as self-assembly or epitope binding can be defined, and proteins new-to-nature generated for these exact purposes.
We are designing and experimentally implementing protein systems for complex cellular engineering. We aim to interface with cellular pathways using compact circuits composed of de novo designed proteins capable of rapid computations directly at the protein level. For implementing this new form of cellular programming, we generate synthetic interactomes and deploy these for in situ classification and reporting of cell states.