Congrats to Ryan and co. for “Cas9 fusions for precision in vivo editing” out on the bioRxiv!

The lab’s first pub is a nifty piece of synth bio for genome editing the brain. Richardson et al. describe a platform to test and develop new high-precision genome editing reagents. Some of our new CRISPR fusions, like eRad18-Cas9-CtIP with linear donors, showed up to 45-times higher accuracy at point-mutation editing compared to vanilla CRISPR. Another step toward direct in vivo knockin and in situ gene therapy approaches!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.199620v1

The Lab goes to Chicago…

(photo by T. Soykan)

The lab has fun recreating Raphael’s “The School of Athens” in Chicago, while presenting at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience!

Ryan, Marilyn, and Jeffrey unveiled their new approach to high efficiency in vivo genome engineering with in situ CRISPR:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/65807

Bek, Andrea, Noury, and Uriel debuted their findings on how a mutation in a family with intellectual disability affects the dynactin complex and cortical circuit wiring:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/66733

Alex presented new findings on how phosphorylation of Neuroligin adhesion molecules determines synapse specificities:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/58703

And how reciprocal adhesion gradient matching guides the development of cortical circuitry:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/63936

… and Garrett stashed us some sweet top-shelf probes…

Lab welcomes three new STARs!!!

We are very excited to welcome the newest PouLab members, three talented postbac scholars from UMB’s prestigious STAR-PREP program will become the lab’s youngest investigators! Jefferey Inen, mouse geneticist & cancer biologist extraordinaire from UMBC, will work with Ryan Richardson; Saovleak “Noury” Khim, all-round development-to-regenerative neuroscientist from Temple, and Uriel Jean-Baptiste, hardcore structure-function biochemist from Florida State, will work with Bek Altas. Welcome to your new lab, enjoy your research, and get lots of great data!