Cell behavior as cellular robotics: understanding and engineering cellular diversity
Scott Coyle, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Our approach is premised on a back and forth between discovery-oriented systems biology that mines the diversity of the natural world for guiding principles into how behaviors are encoded by cells; synthetic biology that expands this knowledge into motifs and modules with broad, transferable utility; and a molecular machine shop in which we assemble microscale molecular systems from biochemical components in vitro to clarify our understanding from the bottom-up to provide a path forward towards engineering microscale machines and molecular robots.