digital twins
Digital Twins of Living Systems
Agent-based and biochemistry-informed simulations connecting engineered systems with cells, communities, hosts, and environments.
- digital twins
- simulation
- agent-based models
Digital twins of living systems help make engineered biology safer, more predictable, and easier to reason about before deployment. DRAGGON Lab will use mechanistic models, agent-based simulations, and biochemistry-informed abstractions to connect genetic designs to spatial and community-level behavior.
Simulation scope
This direction begins with microbial communities and engineered bacterial systems, then expands toward host-associated microbiomes and plant-associated systems. The goal is to represent how cells grow, interact, sense, compute, and respond across space and time.
Platform direction
LOICA and SimBOL-style interfaces can connect genetic network designs with simulation environments such as gro and CellModeller. This makes it possible to test how designed genetic functions behave inside single cells, growing colonies, microbial consortia, biofilms, and host or plant contexts.
Applications
Digital twins can support bacteria-as-medicine, resilient gut and skin microbiome systems, engineered plant-microbiome interactions, and future agricultural systems where biological sensing and computation connect crops with machines, drones, or other external measurement systems.