CBN Seminar: Yousong Ding, PhD

“Synthetic biology for illuminating cellular responses in space and the gut”

Cells adapt to environmental stressors through chemistry, producing and responding to small molecules that mediate survival, defense, and communication. My lab integrates enzymology, natural products, and synthetic biology to uncover and reprogram these chemical responses across diverse systems. My talk will begin with our collaborative research on microbes associated with coral diseases and isolated metabolites. I will then discuss how yeast reconfigure metabolism during spaceflight, providing insights into cellular resilience under extreme conditions. Finally, I will highlight our recent work engineering native E. coli strains from the mammalian gut to express fluorescent reporters and bioactive metabolites, offering new ways to probe host–microbiome interactions and therapeutic potential. Together, these studies illustrate how synthetic biology can illuminate fundamental cellular responses from marine environments to the human microbiome, and even beyond Earth.