Congratulations to our iGEM Headquarters team for winning an iGEM 2021 Team Impact Grant! Amazing work! Penn Penn Engineering #MakerSpace #BioMakerSpace #iGEM #WomenInSTEM

Unreasonably excited to share new work from the lab on how oncogenic protein aggregates — and their inhibitors — can reshape cell signal transmission, and possible therapeutic consequences thereof.

Very excited to share my recent work in the Adam Cohen Lab. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Here, we developed a protein “ticker tape” to write in living cells their history of biological processes (e.g., neural activity)!

The team: Saachi Datta, Gloria Lee, Juliette Hooper, Grace Qian, Lana Salloum, Gabrielle Leavitt, and Grace Qian (all twitterless!) The grad student mentors: William Benman(Will Benman), David Gonzalez-Martinez (David Gonzalez-Martinez), and Gabrielle Ho (Gabrielle Ho)

Thrilled to release our lab’s 1st research. Light *and* temperature sensitive tools (thermoptogenetics?) to activate cell signals, from cells to animals, led by Will Benman. nature.com/articles/s4158… Details of an unexpected journey 👇

The cover of our February issue (nature.com/nchembio/volum…) provided by Lukasz Bugaj depicts a zebrafish embryo expressing a fluorescent fusion of the optogenetic protein BcLOV4, whose activity responds to both light temperature, as described in nature.com/articles/s4158….

So excited to share our latest on how oncogenes and drugs corrupt cell signal perception, feat. protein condensates, optogenetics, Erk pulses, and drug resistance -- something for everyone! Led by David Gonzalez-Martinez with huge assist from Lee Roth biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Really excited to share the first chapter of my PhD work in the Lukasz Bugaj with Lee Roth and @confocalTom! Using optogenetic functional profiling, we investigated the effect of oncogenic RTK protein fusions on cell's ability to sense their environment doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…

So happy to share our work from the Lukasz Bugaj, led by David Gonzalez-Martinez. We found that oncogenic EML4ALK can suppress RTK activation by sequestration of signaling effectors, and how drug treatment leads to hyper sensitized cells that can develop resistance. doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…

ooh some of my favorite proteins

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100… Feel free to check out my first paper! We managed to rapidly control protein distribution in E. coli based on optogenetics and LLPS. We also proved that the redistribution of enzymes can switch on metabolic reactions! Credit to Tsinghua iGEM 2019!

Ever wonder if your favorite protein is clustered? Excited to introduce a new reporter strategy called CluMPS that answers this question by amplifying small protein clusters, even endogenous ones. New preprint led by @confocalTom 1/n biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Proud to share a preprint describing the optoPlateReader (oPR), a device for optogenetics, spectroscopy, and feedback control in *each well* of a 96-well plate. Tremendous effort by our ugrad iGEM Headquarters team. Led by Saachi Datta and team mentor Will Benman. 👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our latest! We “found” a protein that *both* clusters AND binds the plasma membrane in response to blue light. But actually it was in front of us the whole time. Work led by Ayush Aditya Pal and Will Benman. A🧵. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Very excited to share the bioRxiv of my first, first-author paper of grad school with my amazing former undergrad and co-first author Aria Fasse! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

👉Multiple cancers escape from multiple MAPK pathway inhibitors and use DNA replication stress signaling to tolerate aberrant cell cycles | Science Signaling science.org/doi/full/10.11…

New preprint! Our latest twist on the BcLOV4 protein: By decoupling its clustering from membrane binding, we made BcLOVclust -- a new method for cytoplasmic optogenetic protein clustering (at low temps!). Lead by the phenomenal Dennis Huang. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… 1/7

Lukasz Bugaj can now visualize the smallest of protein clusters, opening new avenues for detecting the proteins implicated in diseases like Alzheimer’s and testing new treatments: bit.ly/4bwIXP1 #BioEngineering Penn Bioengineering

A temperature-inducible protein module for control of mammalian cell fate ift.tt/3y4Eosa #biorxiv_synbio

Thrilled that our work on the functional effects of EML4-ALK assemblies in cancer cells is now published in Nature Communications. Herculean effort through 2.5+ years of peer review by David Gonzalez-Martinez and Lee Roth. nature.com/articles/s4146…