Enoch Yeung Defends Ph.D. Dissertation at Caltech

January 19, 2016

Enoch Yeung, a former member of the IDeA Labs, defended his Ph.D. dissertation at Caltech today. Titled, “Reverse Engineering and Quantifying Context Effects in Synthetic Gene Networks,” his work was supervised by Professor Richard M. Murray and reviewed by Professors Lea Goentoro, John Doyle, and James L. Beck. Concerning his dissertaion, Enoch comments,

“In the past two decades, our ability to design and implement novel synthetic gene networks has increased dramatically. However, efforts to build large-scale synthetic gene networks are hindered by cellular crosstalk and context effects. In the first part of this talk, I motivate the use of dynamical structure functions in prototyping novel synthetic gene networks. I show their utility in quantifying crosstalk in several simulated biochemical reaction networks. In the case where only partial measurements of a network are available, I explain conditions under which local reconstruction of dynamical structure can lead to global reconstruction. In the second part of this talk, I discuss a particular form of genetic crosstalk arising from compositional context. I use time-lapse single cell fluorescence microscopy to show how compositional context can affect amplitude, induction, timing, and heterogeneity of gene expression in E. coli. Using a mathematical model and in vitro experiments, I show that supercoiling is the physical mechanism for these context effects. Finally, I show that compositional context can be used to improve performance of the genetic toggle switch.”

Enoch has accepted a position as a research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, continuing much of the work he began at IDeA Labs and further developed at Caltech using Dynamical Structure Functions to represent and analyze complex network systems, especially for applications in syntehtic biology.