(402e) Invited Talk: Harnessing Synthetic Biology to Characterize and Treat the Gut Microbiome

Synthetic biology is bringing together engineers, physicists and biologists to model, design and construct biological circuits out of proteins, genes and other bits of DNA, and to use these circuits to rewire and reprogram organisms. These re-engineered organisms are going to change our lives in the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, rapid diagnostic tests, and synthetic probiotics to treat infections and a range of complex diseases. In this talk, we highlight recent efforts to create living therapeutics and diagnostics as well as paper-based diagnostics for characterizing and treating the guy microbiome.