Home Department: Chemical Engineering
Mentor: Jennifer Brophy (Bioengineering)

"Screening Environmental Inputs for Multi-Input Synthetic Logic Gates in Plants"

This project focuses on expanding the input repertoire for transcription factor-based logic gates by testing inducible systems that respond to external environmental signals, contributing to researchers’ ability to engineer tightly-controlled genetic modifications in plants with future applications in sustainable agriculture. Jacqueline will screen candidate inducible promoters (such as copper-inducible, heat-shock, or other stress-responsive systems) to identify which can serve as reliable inputs for multi-input logic gates. She will design and build constructs combining these environmental sensors with our existing transcription factor system, test their functionality in plants and characterize their dynamic range and specificity through computational analysis.