Title: Applications of Engineered Live Yeast Systems in Human Health
Description: As the name suggests, synthetic biology designs new biology using human power, knowledge, and creativity. Biology is vast, complicated, and all-inclusive, and so is synthetic biology. I believe synthetic biology is the Utopia of biologists, chemists, physicists, material scientists, engineers,and computer scientists. It is a newly emerged and vastly growing field that can impact and improve our lives in many aspects. I dare to say that anything you see that is done by biology can, in the future, be done better by synthetic biology since, on top of having biology as a teacher and as a template, synthetic biology has the benefit of creative and rational design provided by the human brain. In a way, it is the next step in evolution. In this thesis, we worked on some yeast synthetic biology applications. We used engineered yeasts to create bandages to enhance and accelerate the healing of diabetic wounds, make biosensors for pathogenic bacteria and a small molecule metabolite (glucose) important in diabetic patients, and design a community of cells that could contain artificial intelligence.

Chapter 1 gives a short introduction and background information regarding diabetes, wound healing, and advanced healing therapies. Chapter 2 is focused on engineering yeasts to secrete wound-healing proteins and in vitro and cell-based studies on the engineered yeasts and secreted recombinant proteins. Chapter 3 presents two wound dressings that contain engineered live yeasts as active ingredients. This chapter includes further in vitro and cell-based studies to assess the functionality of the designed dressings. Chapter 4 focuses on in vivo experiments to study the wound-healing properties of the designed live yeast dressings. Finally, Chapter 5 presents two other projects: one on live yeast biosensors and one on designing modular smart yeast communities that can do computation based on neural network algorithms.