Jinyao Liu is interested in chemical synthetic biology, mainly including the chemical innovation and application of living microbial materials and therapeutics as well as living-synthetic hybrid microrobotics and synthetic microbiota-host interfaces. The major strategy is the use of surface chemical modification rather than synthetic bioengineering to manipulate the behavior and/or biofunctions of microbes. Particularly, Jinyao and his team exploit a surface nanocoating method to tune bacterial resistance, adaptability, colonization, and interactions with the host. As the microbiome plays essential roles in host immunomodulation and nutrient metabolism, these studies can create new intervention approaches to prevent and treat the related diseases, such as cancer, inflammation, infection, etc.