Christopher Voigt is an American synthetic biologist, molecular
biophysicist
Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations ...
, and engineer.
Career
Voigt is the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor of Advanced Biotechnology in the Department of Biological Engineering at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
(MIT). He works in the developing field of
synthetic biology
Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary field of science that focuses on living systems and organisms. It applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nat ...
. He is the co-director of the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT and the co-founder of the MIT-Broad Foundry.
His research interests focus on the programming of cells to perform coordinated and complex tasks for applications in medicine, agriculture, and industry. His works include:
* Design of
genetic circuits in bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells. Encoded in DNA, these circuits implement computational operations inside of cells.
* Software to program living cells (Cello), which is based on principles from
electronic design automation
Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...
and is based on
Verilog
Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits, with the highest level of abstraction being at the re ...
.
* Genetically encoded sensors that enables cells to respond to chemicals, environmental cues, and colored light.
* Computational tools to design precision genetic parts, based on biophysics, bioinformatics, and machine learning.
* Therapeutic bacteria to navigate the human body and identify and correct disease states.
* Redesign of the
nitrogen fixation
Nitrogen fixation is a chemical process by which molecular dinitrogen () is converted into ammonia (). It occurs both biologically and abiological nitrogen fixation, abiologically in chemical industry, chemical industries. Biological nitrogen ...
gene cluster to facilitate its transfer between organisms and control with synthetic sensors and circuits.
* Pharmaceutical discovery from large databases of DNA sequences, including the human gut microbiome, though high-throughput pathway recoding and DNA synthesis.
* Harnessing cells to produce materials, including spider silk, nylon-6, and DNA nanomaterials.
In addition, he is the:
* Founding Member of the National Science Foundation-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), renamed the Engineering Biology Research Center (EBRC).
* Editor-in-Chief of ACS Synthetic Biology.
* Co-founder of the companies Asimov (cellular programming) and Pivot Biotechnologies (agriculture).
* Co-founder of the Synthetic Biology: Engineering Evolution and Design (SEED) Conference Series.
* Chair of the SAB for the Dutch chemical company
DSM.
His former students have founded Asimov (mammalian synthetic biology), De Novo DNA (computational design), Bolt Threads (spider silk-based textiles), Pivot Bio (agriculture), and Industrial Microbes
(methane consuming organisms).
External links
Official Group WebsiteSB7.0 Talk: Foundational Tools & EngineeringSynthetic Biology: Programming Living BacteriaDecoding Synthetic BiologyEngineering Biology
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Voigt, Christopher
Synthetic biologists
University of Michigan alumni
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)