User:Josh K. Michener
Josh Michener (jkm at mit dot edu)
Lab history
Past UROP in the Endy Lab (MIT).
Future rotation student in the Smolke Lab (Caltech)
Education
Incoming Caltech Bioengineering grad student.
MIT Class of 2006, majoring in Chemical Engineering and Biology
Past Project
Combining biological parts is currently very difficult. Parts are connected in the hopes that the levels of POPS or RIPS will match. At the moment, though, we do not have enough information to predict whether two parts will function correctly. If, for instance, we connect two inverters in series, it is quite possible that switching the output of the first inverter will not be able to switch the second. Previous attempts to measure these levels have been unsuccessful. We hope to learn from this and try again.
As such, I am building a set of POPS based screening plasmids. If all goes as planned, these plasmids will allow us to measure the transfer functions of parts (inverters or other) in units which are proportional to POPS (with the same constant of proportionality for the part's input and output). We will then try to pair up parts and verify that the behavior is as expected.
