About

Tong Si is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of synthetic biology, automation, and protein engineering, whose work has fundamentally advanced the capacity to design and optimize biological systems at scale. His most celebrated contribution — an automated platform for multiplex genome-scale engineering in *Saccharomyces cerevisiae* (2017, 201 citations) — broke new ground by extending powerful genome-scale engineering tools beyond bacterial systems into eukaryotic organisms, opening new frontiers for metabolic engineering and biofuel research. Building on this foundation, Si has championed the integration of robotic automation and machine learning into the biological design-build-test-learn cycle, as demonstrated through his work accelerating strain engineering for biofuel applications and developing Bayesian optimization-guided evolutionary algorithms for protein engineering. His laboratory has also pioneered high-throughput, label-free mass spectrometric screening approaches for enzyme and lanthipeptide variant discovery, dramatically expanding experimental throughput. Through his research on biological foundries and automation in synthetic biology, Si has helped establish a new paradigm where robotic experimentation and intelligent computation work in concert, empowering researchers to navigate vast biological design spaces with unprecedented efficiency and precision.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

7
H-Index
8
Papers
403
Total Citations
50
Avg Citations/Paper
🏆 Most Cited Paper
Automated multiplex genome-scale engineering in yeast
201 citations · 2017
📈 Most Prolific Year: 2022 (5 Papers)
🤝 Key Collaborators: 31
🏛 Institutions: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou), Chinese Academy of Sciences, BGI Group (China), Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology

Top Papers

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Key Collaborators

Contact & Links

Available for collaboration
Content generated · 14 days ago