Michael B. Elowitz

Work helped initiate synthetic biology. Designed and built the Repressilator, a synthetic genetic oscillator composed of repressor genes, demonstrating that bottom-up, 'build-to-understand' approaches could be used to address fundamental biological questions. Discovered that 'noise' (stochastic fluctuations) plays a major role in gene expression. Using an approach involving two co-regulated fluorescent proteins, showed how to quantify noise and discriminate it from other sources of variability. Subsequently, analyzed gene expression noise in diverse cell types and revealed its biochemical underpinnings and showed how noise plays functional roles in genetic circuits controlling cellular behaviors from stress response to differentiation. Noise now a core part of modern cell biology, both through the limitations it imposes on cells and the possibilities it enables. His lab is bringing synthetic and single-cell approaches together to analyze and design new signaling and regulatory circuits in cells.