Zhang lab @ MIT & Broad

Biological Discovery & Engineering

Image credit to Steph Stevens (2023)

We explore and study biological diversity to understand nature and discover systems and processes that may be harnessed through bioengineering for the improvement of human well-being.

Recent Highlights

Engineering PNMA2 for mRNA delivery

March 4, 2024

Madigan, Zhang, Raghavan et al. characterize the human PNMA2 protein and show it forms capsids that can be engineered for mRNA delivery. Read more in PNAS

Uncovering rare CRISPR-Cas systems with deep terascale clustering

November 23, 2023

Altae-Tran, Kannan et al. develop FLASH, a clustering algorithm capable of handling terascale datasets, and apply it to discover >200 new CRISPR systems. Read more in Science.

Diversity & Evolution of TnpB & Cas12

November 20, 2023

Altae-Tran et al. perform a comprehensive evolutionary analysis of TnpB to reveal an immensely diverse set of candidate systems for genome editing. Read more in PNAS.