The Qian lab is interested in designing and constructing nucleic-acid systems from scratch that exhibit programmable behaviors – at the basic level, such as recognizing molecular events from the environment, processing information, making decisions and taking actions; at the advanced level, such as learning and evolving – to explore the principles of molecular programs that nature creates, to embed control within biochemical systems that directly interact with molecules, and eventually, to re-create synthetic molecular programs that approach the complexity and sophistication of life itself.