Goals and Approach

The “Sense” team will be part of a larger effort that includes teams focused on expanding our abilities to engineer cells and genomes to autonomously “Write,” “Read,” and “Act” at a molecular level. The Sense team will work on building and improving signal conversion technologies aimed at sensing changes in the cell and transmitting that information to modules that ‘Write’ those changes to the cell’s DNA. Essentially, the team will work to improve the performance of artificial signal transduction capabilities, e.g., using ENGRAM. Our goal is to develop sensors that are sensitive and specific, robust, inert, fast and have broad applicability. By doing so we hope to capture signaling and lineage histories of many thousands of individual cells.