My colleague Aaron Adler just got a nice press-release writeup on a new project he's been starting in the DARPA Friend or Foe program, in which he's leading a team developing methods for culturing and assessing bacteria for their potential danger as human pathogens. I think this is a pretty cool project and potentially quite significant if it can be made to work. Basically, it's all about building environments that can trick a bacteria into behaving "normally" even when it's in the lab, first "culturing the unculturable" by turning the bacteria's home into a lab dish rather than the other way around, then shifting samples into miniature human-like tissue environments to trick the bacteria into revealing otherwise hidden behaviors.
This project is also a nice example of how our synthetic biology group has been growing at BBN, as the core technologies of synthetic biology prove relevant across all sorts of other biological application spaces. Aaron's also one of the folks who has been really excited about the application of artificial intelligence methods to synthetic biology problems, co-organizing workshops and symposia with another colleague, Fusun Yaman. I'm excited to see if this can achieve the potential of its vision, and also excited that our group has grown enough that cool projects like this can be lifting off with minimal involvement from myself.
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