Xiaoli Chen

This paper shows that a synthetic gene circuit can break a growth rate plateau in E. coli by selectively suppressing slow-growing cells, leading to faster growth.

The paper shows that prolonged plasmid persistence after antibiotic treatment is due to dynamical memory, not horizontal transfer or low plasmid cost.

The paper shows that microbial community dynamics can be represented by low-dimensional latent variables, with the critical dimension scaling linearly with observables.

The paper shows transposon-plasmid nesting allows microbes to rapidly respond to environmental changes by combining genetic mobility with copy number amplification.