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Julius Lucks

Uncovering the principles of molecular design for biology, medicine and biotechnology

Our research seeks to reveal the principles that enable biological systems to sense and adapt to changing environments and to understand how we can use these principles to engineer synthetic biological systems that benefit humankind. A focal point of our work is RNA –a fundamental component of all living systems that enacts genetic, regulatory and catalytic functions by folding into intricate shapes within cells. An overarching approach of our work is to distill the complexity of natural biological systems into design principles that can then be used to build synthetic systems. This dual discovery/synthesis approach allows us to interrogate molecular systems in powerful ways, with each approach informing the other in a cycle of increasing understanding.

Using this approach, we focus on four main research areas:

1. Enabling high-throughput RNA structural biology. We develop tools like SHAPE-Seq that combine chemical probing and next generation sequencing to characterize the structures of hundreds to thousands of RNAs in a single experiment. This data fuels new computational approaches to predict and design RNA structures to understand their biology and engineer their behavior.
2. Discovering new principles of dynamic RNA folding and function. We combine our high throughput structure probing with synthetic biology design approaches and directed evolution to understand how RNA molecules dynamically change their folding and function in biological systems.
3. Impacting human and environmental health with synthetic biotechnologies. We use the fundamental knowledge learned to design RNA biotechnologies that can be used by individuals to monitor the health of themselves and their environments, including the ROSALIND platform for water quality monitoring. We are actively exploring how we can merge these approaches with materials science to extend the capability of our diagnostic systems.
4. Interfacing synthetic biology with social science. Recently we have begun to collaborate with social scientists, policy researchers and law experts to study how users interact with our technologies, and how they can be tailored to benefit their lives.

Julia Yescas

Juliana Feng

Taojunfeng Su

Alexander Lee

Alexander Shaw

Alexandra Moreno