Publishings

Bacterial Immune Proteins Converge on a Virus's DNA Packaging Motor

A paper in Nature Communications by Gao lab members (Simone Evans, Collin Chiu) with collaborators at Stanford and MIT shows how two distinct bacterial immune sensors use unexpected molecular mechanisms to detect the DNA packaging motor of bacterial viruses.

Gao Lab Discovers Bacterial Surveillance System that Detects Most of a Virus’s Core Machinery

A paper in Nature from Gao lab members (Hyunbin Lee, Sofia Luengo-Woods) with collaborators at Stanford and the NIH reveals that bacteria have a surprisingly comprehensive alarm system, with distinct families of intracellular receptors that together keep watch on nearly every essential part of an invading virus.

Rohatgi Lab Identifies a Signaling Mechanism that Drives Colorectal Cancer

In a new paper in Nature Genetics, Ganesh Pusapati and colleagues in the Rohatgi lab used base editing enabled scanning mutagenesis to show that the WNT master regulator β-catenin scaffolds the very destruction complex that degrades it WNT-driven cancers.

Rohatgi Lab Discovers a Unique Search-and-Destroy Strategy for Signaling Receptors

In a new paper in Molecular Cell, the Rohatgi lab, with collaborators at Oxford, describes the structure and mechanism of a membrane machine that targets and destroys cell surface receptors that play key roles in development, cancer, immunity, and obesity.

Gao Lab Discovers New Mechanism of DNA Synthesis

A paper in Science by Gao lab members (Pujuan Deng, Hyunbin Lee, and Carlo Armijo) describes a unique bacterial reverse transcriptase that creates sequence-specific DNA repeats using its own amino acids as the template.

Krasnow Lab Discovers a Built-In ‘On Switch’ for Lung Stem Cell Repair

What tells lung stem cells it’s time to spring into action after injury? New research published in Science uncovers a self-contained signaling system where stem cells produce their own growth trigger—kept safely “on hold” until damage occurs.

Straight Lab publishes paper in EMBO Reports describing mechanisms that control the assembly of the centromere through the cell cycle

A paper published by Straight Lab members (Rae Brown, Jacob Schwartz) find that Xenopus M18BP1 phosphorylation controls its centromere localization in interphase and metaphase, such that this phosphoregulatory switch restricts CENP-A nucleosome assembly to interphase.

Konermann Lab unveil RESPLICE, a new RNA-editing strategy, in Cell Systems

A joint paper from Konermann Lab and Arc Institute collaborators introduce RESPLICE, an RNA-guided trans-splicing platform.

Brandman Lab finds new functions and molecular mechanism for CAT tails in protein quality control

Recent research from the Brandman Lab (Danish Khan, Ananya Vinayak, Cole Sitron, and Onn Brandman) reveals a new force-based mechanism for quality control of stalled ribosomes. CAT tailing is a conserved, non-templated process that extends stalled nascent polypeptide chains while they are still attached to the large ribosomal subunit.

Pfeffer Lab published in Science Signaling for their findings that inhibiting an enzyme could stabilize Parkinson's symptoms

A study in mice suggests that reducing enzyme activity could prevent cell death in patients with a type of Parkinson’s disease.

Kim Lab published in Science magazine for their approach combining the 3D structure of the protein backbone with large language models based on amino acid sequence

Peter S. Kim, Brian Hie, and Kim Lab co-led research on a new ML-based method for designing antibody drugs.

Konermann Lab/ARC Institute’s article on optimized RNA targeting published in Cell Systems

Konermann Lab/ARC Institute publishes an article on Deep learning and CRISPR-Cas13d ortholog discovery for optimized RNA targeting.

Pragya Sidhwani publishes review in Science Direct on Epigenetic inheritance and boundary maintenance

Pragya and Dr. Straight publish their findings in Science Direct.

Repression of CENP-A assembly in metaphase requires HJURP phosphorylation and inhibition by M18BP1

Julio Flores Servin and Rachel Brown from Straight Lab publish a paper on their findings on the “Repression of CENP.”

Kim Lab published in Nature for ferritin-based COVID-19 nanoparticle vaccine

Kim Lab members find that A ferritin-based COVID-19 nanoparticle vaccine that elicits robust, durable, broad-spectrum neutralizing antisera in non-human primates.

Jenn Kong, in the Rohatgi Lab, shows how severe birth defects are caused by gene-environment interactions

Maia Kinnebrew, from the Rohatgi lab, published in eLifeSciences for "Patched 1 reduces the accessibility of cholesterol in the outer leaflet of membranes"

Maia describes a new mechanism for how cholesterol levels in the plasma membrane regulate signal transduction.