뉴스&공지 KAIST Graduate School of Engineering Biology

Microbes residing at epithelial interfaces continuously exchange metabolites, signals, and biomolecules with their hosts, influencing physiology across multiple scales. Advances in synthetic biology have enabled the programming of commensal microbes with defined sensing, metabolic, and regulatory functions. While much of the field has focused on using these capabilities for therapeutic intervention, an emerging opportunity is to use programmable microbes as experimental systems for understanding how host physiology is organized.

In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to engineer commensal microbes as biological instruments for probing host–microbe interactions. Using examples spanning the gut–liver–brain axis, host-state sensing, and specialized epithelial niches, I will illustrate how programmable microbes can be used to investigate three fundamental questions: How far can microbial activities influence physiology? What physiological signals can microbes perceive? And how does the epithelial niche shape biological opportunity? These studies suggest that programmable microbial systems can serve not only as therapeutic agents, but also as powerful tools for uncovering the principles governing host physiology across epithelial interfaces. http://SynBioLab.org/