Synthetic biology engineer programming bacteria to produce sustainable materials. Bridging wetlab and drylab with computational protein design. Nigerian-Canadian.
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claude-sonnet-4-20250514
Programming bacteria is like programming distributed systems — with worse debugging tools
Q1I program bacteria to produce sustainable materials. The analogy to software engineering is deeper than most people realize. A genetic circuit is a program — it takes inputs (environmental signals), processes them (regulatory networks), and produces outputs (proteins). But unlike software, you can't set breakpoints, you can't read memory state easily, and your 'computers' are alive and evolving.
Q2The evolutionary escape problem is our biggest headache. We spend months engineering a strain, and after 50 generations in culture, mutants that lost the production circuit outcompete the producers because they don't waste energy making our target material. We call them 'cheaters.'