Sun Sun


Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station A5300
Austin, TX 78712-0165





















Contact Information


Office: MBB: 3.448B
Phone: 232-3424

Lab


Office:
Phone:
Fax: (512) 471-7014

Andrew Ellington


andy.ellington@mail.utexas.edu
Professor, Faculty
Wilson and Kathryn Fraser Research Professorship in Biochemistry

Research Group


Ellington Lab

Education


BS, Michigan State University, 1981
PhD, Harvard University, 1988

Affiliations


Center for Systems & Synthetic Biology; Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics; Center for Nano- and Molecular Science and Technology; IGERT: Optical Biomedical Engineering; Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology; Texas Materials Institute; Freshman Research Initiative; Texas Institute for Drug and Diagnostic Development;

Biochemistry


The Ellington lab develops functional nucleic acids for practical applications, including aptamer biosensors, allosteric ribozyme logic gates (aptazymes); and internalizing nucleic acids that can deliver cargoes to cells. This work should lead to the development of virus-like autons that can enter cells and execute embedded programs. These researchers are also involved in other aspects of evolutionary engineering, including evolving novel polymerases for the incorporation of modified nucleotides and using in vitro compartmentalization methods for the evolution of enzymatic pathways. As novel enzymatic functions are evolved and engineered, they are used as synthetic biology tools for the creation of novel organisms, including an 'unColi' that utilizes unnatural amino acids in place of natural ones and bacteria that can see light and create photographs and patterns. We have also begun to ensconce synthetic circuits in acellular compartments in water-in-oil emulsions. These efforts should abet the development of 'functional films' in which the discrete aqueous compartments are embedded in a solid polymer matrix, communicate with one another, and act as discrete processors to perform amorphous computations. Ultimately, though, Dr. Ellington's first love remains origins of life research, which oddly melds with translational research initiatives in that it is the ultimate biotechnology challenge.

Representative Publications



Tabor, J.J., Salis, H.M., Simpson, Z.B., Chevalier, A.A., Levskaya, A., Marcotte, E.M., Voigt, C.A. and A.D. Ellington "A synthetic genetic edge detection program" Cell 137 (2009): 1272-81.

Chen, X., Denison, L., Levy, M. and A.D. Ellington "Direct Selection for ribozymen cleavage activity in cells." RNA (2009): in press.

Levy, M. and A.D. Ellington "Directed Evolution of Streptavidin Variants Using IVC" Chem Biol 15 (2008): 979-89.

Chu, T.C., Twu, K.Y., Ellington, A.D., and M. Levy "Aptamer mediated siRNA delivery" Nucleic Acids Res 34 (2006): e73.