And last but not least, we have Dr Yingzi Huang, who presented a wonderful seminar on her chromatin within the context of DNA damage. Stay tuned for this story…

Next, we have our newly minted Dr Esmat Hegazi, who gave an excellent talk on oncohistones. Look out for her work coming out soon… @esmathegazi

With the start of the new academic year comes several farewells from our lab, as senior members of the lab graduate. First off, congratulations to our “transposein” Dr Yi Hua, who is heading off to @Stanford for a postdoc with @aliceyting

While our prior applications of SMART involve a splice-and-retain mechanism, we also show that we can engineer SMART to perform a novel AND-gated splice-and-release operation. This is applied to the reconstitution of an active interleukin 1B from inactive fragments.

We are also able to show that SMART works with a range of targeting vectors, ranging from scFvs to peptides to small molecules. We also show that we can perform AND-gated enzymatic proximity labeling using APEX2 and photocatalytic proximity labeling using micro-Map

However, given the widespread applications of AND-gated logic, we chose to focus on efforts on this front, and showed that we can do targeted cell depletion with exquisite selectivity for cells displaying the right combination of epitopes

We are also able to develop other logic gated operations using this system. By engineering split-intein cages and SpyCatcher, we show that our system is able to operate a 3-input AND/NOT gate.

This project started with the development of a split-SpyCatcher that is faithfully reconstituted when two distinct epitopes on cell surfaces is targeted.

Congratulations to our second years Alan and Chuqi for passing their general exams and officially becoming PhD candidates!

That’s a wrap for our 3rd year seminars, who all did a fantastic job presenting updates on their research progress!

In particular, we use CAGE to study the dynamics of phosphorylation events, which enable us to identify and target kinases involved in these oncofusion disease pathways!