The Zalatan research group seeks to understand and engineer biochemical networks, with a focus on cell signaling, gene expression, and enzymatic biosynthesis. Our basic research efforts focus on the mechanisms that regulate specificity in interconnected cell signaling networks. Our engineering projects span a broad range of topics including metabolic engineering, enzymatic biosynthesis, and CRISPR-Cas tools to regulate gene expression in bacterial and eukaryotic systems.

These efforts will help us to understand how cells exert precise spatial and temporal control over biochemical reactions and provide us with new strategies to engineer biological functions. We use a combination of approaches from biochemistry, enzymology, and synthetic biology.

We are located in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington, and we are affiliated with the Center for Synthetic Biology, the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute, and the Biological Physics, Structure, and Design program. Outside of UW, we are affiliated with the Engineering Biology Research Consortium.