Khalil Lab
Principal Investigator: Ahmad Samir Khalil
Institution: Broad Institute (Cambridge, MA)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY The recent development of continuous directed evolution (CDE) methods has made it increasingly possible to generate biomolecules with radically altered or even new functions capable of addressing unmet needs in medicine, biotechnology, and synthetic biology. By transforming the traditional stepwise process of classical directed evolution into one that operates continuously in cells, these CDE methods, such as Phage-Assisted Continuous Evolution (PACE), can theoretically enable extensive speed, scale, and depth in an evolutionary search. However, the technical limitations of implementing PACE (and other CDE techniques) have restricted what can be practically achieved with these approaches alone. To overcome these limitations, our collaborative team recently established ePACE, a new technology that combines PACE with an automated, scalable, and customizable continuous culture platform, called eVOLVER. By on-boarding the infrastructural and fluidic requirements of PACE onto eVOLVER, we overcame many of the limitations of traditional PACE and unlocked pathways for automated, parallel, and continuous evolution of biomolecules. Using ePACE, we already succeeded in generat…
Active NIH Awards
- 7R01EB027793-08: ePACE: automation platforms for adaptable and scalable continuous evolution of biomolecules with therapeutic potential (2026)
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