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With growing understanding of how diverse cellular functions are encoded by biomolecular condensates, opportunities have emerged for cellular control via engineering of synthetic biomolecular condensates. In this talk, I will introduce synthetic intrinsically disordered proteins (SynIDPs) that are genetically encoded polymers of short peptide repeats that exhibit upper critical solution temperature (UCST) or lower critical solution temperature (LCST) phase behavior like many naturally occurring IDPs. Because of their simplicity, the phase behavior of SynIDPs can be rationally tuned at the molecular level by control of their sequence, composition, and chain length, so that they are extremely useful for the design of synthetic biomolecular condensates. I will describe several recent examples from my laboratory on the use of synIDPs to create biomolecular condensates in live cells to control diverse cellular functions. |