Calin Plesa is a synthetic biologist whose research interests lie at the intersection of biochemistry, protein engineering, microbiology, synthetic biology, genetics and technology. He was awarded an NIH New Innovator Award for this project, “Proteome Scale Multiplexed Generation of Recombinant Antibodies.” The work in Plesa’s lab focuses on large-scale gene synthesis, which plays an important role in functional characterization of DNA sequences and for the development of synthetic biology. Current efforts in this area have been slowed by high cost. Plesa developed a method called DropSynth, which allows the generation of large libraries of genes and functional testing of all possible mutations at relatively low cost, which opens new avenues of research and potential applications.
Recent Media:
DNA of Things: Embedding Machines with Replication Data (Evolution News & Science Today, Jan. 8, 2020)
3D-printed bunny contains DNA instructions to make a copy of itself (New Scientist, Dec. 9, 2019)
The dawn of cheap and easy DNA writing (proto.life, November 2019)
Calin Plesa, Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact
Calin Plesa
Assistant Professor, Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact
Practice Areas: Protein Engineering, Gene Synthesis, Biosensing, Synthetic Metagenomics, Antibiotic Resistance, Sequence-Function Relationships, Multiplex Functional Assays, Histidine Kinases