Field of Study

We are interested in how genetic circuits, composed of interacting genes and proteins, enable individual cells to make decisions, oscillate, and communicate with one another. To learn about these issues, we develop and use several experimental techniques:

• We build our own synthetic genetic circuits and study their functions. These synthetic circuits are simpler counterparts to the complex circuits one finds in nature. This approach is often called "synthetic biology."
  
• We make time-lapse movies to quantitatively observe dynamics of natural and synthetic genetic circuits in individual cells. These experiments take advantage of multiple fluorescent proteins to observe several parts of a circuit simultaneously in the same cell.
  
• We study variability within cell populations, and try to understand how genetic circuits generate variability, through intrinsic noise, use such variability (for differentiation), or operate reliably in spite of variability.

Projects in the lab also make extensive use of relatively simple theoretical models of genetic circuits.

Selected Publications

Süel GM, Kulkarni RP, Dworkin J, Garcia-Ojalvo J, Elowitz MB., Tunability and noise dependence in differentiation dynamics, Science, 2007 Mar 23;315:1716-1719.

Süel G, Garcia-Ojalvo J, Liberman L, Elowitz MB., An excitable gene regulatory circuit induces transient cellular differentiation, Nature, 2006 Mar 23;440:545-50.

Sprinzak D, Elowitz MB., Reconstruction of genetic circuits, Nature. 2005 Nov 24;438(7067):443-8.

Rosenfeld N, Young JW, Alon U, Swain PS, Elowitz MB, Gene
regulation at the single-cell level. Science, 2005, 307(5717):1962-5 (pdf)

Elowitz MB, Levine AJ, Siggia ED, Swain PS Stochastic Gene Expression in a Single Cell. Science, 2002, 297(5584): 1183-6.

Guet C, Elowitz MB, Hsing W, Leibler S. Combinatorial synthesis of genetic networks. Science, 2002, 296(5572): 1466-70.

Elowitz MB & Leibler S A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators Nature, 2000, 403(6767): 335-338.

Rosenfeld N, Elowitz MB, Alon U. Negative autoregulation speeds the response times of transcription networks J. Mol. Biol., 2002, 323(5): 785-93

Elowitz MB, Surette MG, Wolf PE, Stock J, Leibler S Photoactivation turns green fluorescent protein red Curr. Biol. 1997, 7(10), 809-12

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last modified 11 April, 2008
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