Message from The University of Chicago to recently tenured faculty: Now that you are tenured you might feel the urge to keep doing what made you successful. Fight it. We want you to feel safe to fail. Fail often. Use your tenure to make a difference. Inspiring & beautiful. A true university.

Our latest work in the field of chemical biology: A novel method for photoproximity labeling! Congrats Jacob Geri, James, Tao, Stefan McCarver, and our Merck collaborators! Check it out now in Science Magazine science.sciencemag.org/content/367/64…

Thanks, Kavya Smitha Pillai! #BLM

Check out my MIT course this fall on “COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic”, taught by leading scientists Tuesdays at 11:30 ET beginning Sept 1. For the syllabus and a link to the live stream, visit bit.ly/700Covid.

My group has an immediate postdoc position open for a candidate with a strong background in synthesis. Well-funded project and an opportunity to learn chembio while leveraging synthetic skills in a collaborative environment. DM or email me with questions

We have two pdoc positions for candidates with interest in synthesis, proteomics and chemical biology. One will be dual-mentored with the Rawal group. Both are on a fully-funded, multi-institution project. Email or DM me directly & pass along to those you think may be interested!

Looking to study chromatin interactomes with proximity labeling? Check out our new paper in nature, where we combine our split-intein expertise with uMap technology from the MacMillan Group to map the microenvironment of chromatin state changes. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Congrats to Antony and Gihoon Lee, and former MacMillan Group postdoc @CiaranSeath, and collaborators from the KleinerLab. A wonderful @PrincetonChemistry collaboration!

Today we introduce Light-induced Interactome Tagging (LITag) in PNASNews, where we use light to activate a genetically-encoded LOV protein for second-scale proximity labeling. Congrats to authors @HananyaNir, Xuanjia, and Shany Koren! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Check out our new pre-print, illustrating the power of our strategy for studying molecular pathways of oncofusions associated with the initial stages of cell transformation and discovering upstream intermediates as novel cancer therapeutic targets. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Today we introduce our SMART (Splicing-Modulated Actuation upon Recognition of Target) intein Platform, where we use a new caged split intein to perform Boolean logic gated functions on the cell surface. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Ever wanted to swap out an entire internal region of a folded protein for functional biochemical studies? Check out our preprint that has been 5 years in the making, in which we establish a protein editing platform via protein transposition, enabling the insertion of functional

Check out our latest paper in Nature Chemical Biology, where we developed our CAGE split intein platform to study signaling events using proteomic profiling. This enables insights into the differential molecular connections of fusion oncogenes. Congrats to Gihoon Lee! nature.com/articles/s4158…

Inspired by how chromosomal translocations redirect protein behaviors to cause cancer, we developed the CAGE to achieve this at a post-translational level. This method matches protein activation kinetics to the timescale of cellular processes, including oncogenic signaling (2/5)

Combining quantitative phosphoproteomics, we discovered distinct phases in cell signaling initiated by DNAJ-PKAc, a hallmark of pediatric liver cancer FL-HCC. We found that SGK1 links DNAJ-PKAc activity to the MAPK pathway, suggesting a potential drug target for FL-HCC (3/5)

The CAGE system can uncover molecular mechanisms of diseases linked to aberrant protein behaviors with time-resolved omics, offering time-dimension data for bioinformatics and identifying novel therapeutic biomarkers. Also excited for its applications in synthetic biology! (4/5)

Many thanks to Tom and The Muir Lab for their invaluable support of this work! (5/5)

The final version of our protein transposition manuscript is now published in Science Magazine science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… We’ve added a few new things since our preprint /1