Drew Endy’s New Lab

All shiny and new in the Stanford Y2E2 building today.

I had to take a photo when I saw the placards:

• Laboratory for Total RNA Dominance
• Short Term DNA Memory Leaks Lab

The palpable excitement around the new programs reminds me of an informal survey I did of Engineering Deans two years ago. Bioengineering is the fastest growing area in undergraduate engineering at Duke, and literally off the chart for Stanford’s grad student applicant tracking system. UT Austin’s bioengineering program filled up and they are trying to sell students on EE instead. Berkeley told me they saw a doubling of biomedical engineering enrollment. I also found a survey of freshmen on their intended majors; Bio beats Computer Science and all other engineering fields.

Update: in 2012, he published some astounding results from this work, having created a digital memory element in DNA. More precisely, it’s an SR Latch, and they are now building a byte-wide register.

Why would researchers want to do this? This could be used to count cell divisions to trace the embryonic development of an organism cell-by-cell. Or more radically, imagine if every cell has a unique ID, clocking at each cell division. Consider the brain. Imagine if that code could express a coded RNA that would migrate to the synapse, where it could bundle with other RNA from connecting neurons. In one destructive readout, you could shotgun sequence all of those RNA bundles and derive the full connectome of the brain in one step.

Here is the preprint of their PNAS paper.