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.