Guest Editors
Tayler Schimel
University of Tennessee
Tayler Schimel is a researcher at the Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology at the University of Tennessee. She obtained her PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering from the same University in 2020. During her PhD, she focused on engineering platforms for plant synthetic biology, primarily microfluidic devices single cell analysis and a laser imaging system for stand-off detection of fluorescent protein expression in whole plants. Nowadays, her research focuses on machine learning for identifying and assessing the viability of human parasites and evaluating potential inactivation methods.
Scott Lenaghan
University of Tennessee
Scott C. Lenaghan is an Associate Professor within the Department of Food Science at the University of Tennessee, with an adjunct position in the Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering (MABE) Department. After completing a PhD from Auburn University in Biological Sciences, and a two-year postdoc in the MABE Department at the University of Tennessee, he was promoted to Research Assistant Professor within MABE in 2011. In 2013, he accepted a Research Assistant Professor position at the Center for Renewable Carbon (CRC) to lead an ARPA-E funded project on single-cell biology and bioengineering. Upon successful completion of that project, he accepted his current position within the Department of Food Science and has established a nationally recognized lab focused on the development and use of synthetic biology for global food security and biosensing. His research and expertise cover a wide range of disciplines, with a primary focus on engineering biological systems, biomaterials, and devices that utilize cutting-edge synthetic biology tools and approaches. A goal of his research is to expand the current definition of synthetic biology beyond molecular biology tools, translating advances into synthetic/engineered constructs, such as micro/nanorobots, diagnostic devices, and biosensors. Commensurate with these goals, in 2018, he founded and serves as the Director of the Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology (CASB) along with Dr. C. Neal Stewart, Jr. In addition to his research, he currently teaches a course on molecular parasitology to introduce students to underrepresented pathogens that cause significant damage to the overall quality of life of humans and animals.
Collection Overview
Synthetic biology lies at the intersection between engineering, computer science, and biology and strives to re-design living organisms for novel purposes. Already, synthetic biology has displayed considerable potential with the development of bio-concretes, production of heme from yeast to make a more realistic plant-based burger, and biological nitrogen fertilizers to enhance corn production name a few. To achieve the necessary advances within a compressed timescale, synthetic biology has excelled at using high throughput approaches to accelerate design-build-test cycles. Considering the complexities and unknowns that exist in biological systems, progress in fundamental biology is often time-consuming and laborious. One tool utilized to increase sample throughput and minimize cost is microfluidics. Droplet-based experimental platforms such as droplet microfluidics and droplet-interface-bilayers enable an analysis of single cells instead of populations of cells, thereby increasing the number of data points accessible to researchers. Additionally, the ability to manipulate and interrogate picolitre-sized droplets provides a platform for conducting high-throughput parallel experiments utilizing protocells or even cell-free reactions. This article collection will include methods for droplet-based synthetic biology, droplet systems and microfluidics, and single-cell research that may be utilized to advance the state-of-the-art in synthetic biology.
Articles
