Chueh Loo POH
Chueh Loo POHAssociate Professor
[email protected]

Affiliations

Deputy Director, National Centre for Engineering Biology (NCEB), NUS
Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Design and Engineering, NUS
Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
Principal Investigator, NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI)

Biography

Dr. Chueh Loo POH is an Associate Professor with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Desing and Engineering, at National University of Singapore (NUS) and Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS. He is Deputy Director of National Centre for Engineering Biology and Director of NUS Biofoundry. He is also deputy director of SINERGY, Singapore consortium for Synthetic Biology. His research interests in Synthetic Biology focuses on reprogramming microbes for health and sustainability. He is the founding and current president of the Society of Synthetic Biology, Singapore (SynBioSG), vice-chair of the Global Biofoundry Alliance (GBA) steering committee and co-Editor-in-Chief of Wiley/IET Engineering Biology journal. He also serves as member in OECD Expert working group in Engineering Biology.

Education

– Imperial College London, UK
– PhD in Bioengineering (Funded by NTU Overseas Scholarship)
– Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore
– Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical & Electronic) with Honors (First Class)

Research Interest

My Engineering Biology research group at NUS focuses on Synthetic Biology in which we apply engineering principles to design and build microbes with useful capabilities for biomedical and industrial applications, with special interest in engineering novel living biosensors for applications in health, sustainable biomanufacturing, and DNA data storage. To this end, we have been “reprogramming” microbes as living biosensors to fight infectious causing pathogen, light/thermal controllable living biosensors for biomanufacturing, and high-performance biosensors for ultra-high throughput screening.
At the same time, we are developing platform tools and technologies to accelerate the design and engineering of the microbes along the design-build-test-learn cycle. This includes computer aided design, machine learning/AI and modelling tools for SynBio and biofoundry for rapid prototyping. We combine both experimental and computational approaches in engineering our microbes. We are highly motivated to make engineering of biology more efficient and predictive so that we can scale complexity in order to create novel solutions to tackle global challenges.

Current Research Projects

• Carbon Negative production of advanced Sustainable Aviation Fuels using twin synthetic bacterial consortia (CNegSAF)
• National Centre for Engineering Biology
• ML/AI driven biodesign
• Biosensors development for ultra-high throughput screening
• Development of data management system (SynBioDB) for ML/AI driven DBTL
• Biological “camera” for DNA data storage

Selected Publications

  1. J Zhang, S Shanmugam, JW Yeoh, D Zheng, JR Goh, CL Poh (2025) Machine learning-assisted enzyme engineering through ultra-high throughput sorting and large-scale sequence-function data generation. bioRxiv, 2025
  2. J Zhang, AA Kunartama, YH Tan, CL Poh (2025) Developing genetically encoded biosensors for flavonoid luteolin Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical 426, 137117
  3. D Zheng, J Zhang, W Jiang, Y Xu, H Meng, CL Poh, CH Chen (2024) Graphene oxide aptasensor droplet assay for detection of metabolites secreted by single cells applied to synthetic biology. Lab on a Chip. 24 (1), 137-147
  4. CK Lim, JW Yeoh, AA Kunartama, WS Yew, CL Poh (2023) A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA. Nature Communications 14 (1), 3921
  5. SHK Yap, J Pan, DV Linh, X Zhang, X Wang, WZ Teo, E Zamburg, CK Tham, WS Yew, CL Poh, AVY Thean (2022) Engineered Nucleotide Chemicapacitive Microsensor Array Augmented with Physics‐Guided Machine Learning for High‐Throughput Screening of Cannabidiol. Small. 18 (22), 2107659
  6. JW Yeoh, S S/O Jayaraman, SGD Tan, P Jayaraman, MB Holowko, JY Zhang, CW Kang, HL Leo, CL Poh (2021) A model-driven approach towards rational microbial bioprocess optimization. Biotechnology and Bioengineering. 118 (1), 305-318
  7. J Zhang, Y Luo, CL Poh (2020) Blue light-directed cell migration, aggregation, and patterning. Journal of molecular biology
  8. Building a global alliance of biofoundries (2019) N Hillson, M Caddick, Y Cai, JA Carrasco, …..CL Poh… – Nature communications. 10(1), 2040
  9. P Jayaraman, JW Yeoh, J Zhang, CL Poh (2018) Programming the dynamic control of bacterial gene expression with a chimeric ligand-and light-based promoter system. ACS synthetic biology 7 (11), 2627-2639
  10. Jayaraman P, Devarajan K, Chua TK, Zhang H, Gunawan E, Poh CL. (2016) Blue light-mediated transcriptional activation and repression of gene expression in bacteria. Nucleic Acids Res. Jun 28.