Dai Lab
Principal Investigator: Yifan Dai
Institution: Washington University in St. Louis (Saint Louis, MO)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Biochemistry always requires an exact buffering environment (e.g., salt condition, pH). Considering the diversity of biochemical functions and spatial complexity of cellular processes in living cells, our lab is extremely curious about how living systems orchestrate the right buffering systems to satisfy diverse cellular functions in a spatial temporal manner and how these fundamental principles of life can be implemented to understand diseases and provide new tools for bioengineering. To address these questions, our lab works at the interface of physical chemistry and molecular and cell biology to 1) explore the fundamental physicochemical and electrochemical features of living systems, 2) establish a new theoretical framework to explore whether and to what extent these fundamental electrochemical features (e.g., proton motive force) can define passive chemical functions, 3) correlate the chemical and electrochemical environments with global cellular physiology to understand the developments of diseases and 4) design new fundamental capabilities for synthetic biology to study cellular behaviors and engineer cellular functions. Our recent works in biomolecular conde…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM162028-01: Uncovering the molecular principles of intracellular electrochemistry (2026)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com