This reprogramming lies at the heart of the relatively new and rapidly expanding field of synthetic biology, which is allowing scientists to begin developing, simulating, testing, and building cells for a range of applications.

An example is a product that detects the presence of the dangerous pathogen Listeria in food much more quickly than current methods. Developed by the Cambridge-based start-up company Sample6, which was co-founded by Lu and Michael Koeris when the two were graduate students, the product involves engineering a bacteriophage to identify and then tag Listeria with a "genetic circuit" that causes it to make luciferase. "Because luciferase is an enzyme that generates light, we can then use a very simple luminometer device to detect the light and easily measure whether a sample is infected," Lu explains.