Zhang is the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, an associate professor in the MIT departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Two members of the MIT faculty were named Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators today. “We are delighted to receive this generous support from the Mathers Foundation, which makes it possible for us to pursue an outside-the-box, high-risk/high-impact idea regarding the origins of osteoarthritis,” said Shoulders. NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, 2012, by The Brain | January 1, 2019October 21, 2019. Nature Communications. Anne Trafton | June 26, 2018January 18, 2019. Zhang has led the subsequent development of CRISPR as a platform technology for gene editing, and since 2013 has published a series of papers that have rapidly advanced the field. As a graduate student, Zhang was part of the team that developed optogenetics. He’s committed to taking an open approach and enabling the global research community to use CRISPR for a variety of applications. Together, these tools are changing the way molecular biology research is conducted, and they hold immense potential as therapeutic agents to correct thousands of genetic diseases. Aquel usuario que incluya en sus mensajes algún comentario violatorio del reglamento será eliminado e inhabilitado para volver a comentar. His lab's tools are used in neuroscience, immunology, clinical medicine, and cancer biology, among other fields. Nature protocols 7 (1), 171-192, 2012. Expression plasmids are available from Addgene. MIT’s four new NAS members are: Amy Finkelstein, the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics; Mehran Kardar, the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics; Xiao-Gang Wen, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics; and Feng Zhang, the Patricia and James Poitras ’63 Professor in Neuroscience at MIT, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and of biological … Zhang went on to pioneer the deployment of the microbial CRISPR-Cas9 system for genome engineering in eukaryotic cells. Lo singular del hallazgo de Doudna y Charpentier es que permite intervenir a la manera de un procesador de texto, como si tomáramos una oración, la cortáramos e insertáramos las letras correctas. If correct, the proteostasis collapse model for osteoarthritis could one day lead to a novel class of therapeutic options for the disease. “Being named to the investigator program recognizes their previous achievements and allows them to follow the innovative path that is a trait of their research.”. “CRISPR-based tools are often DNA-cutting tools, and they’re very efficient at disrupting genes. Most transposons appear to jump randomly throughout the cellular genome and out to viruses or plasmids that may also be inhabiting a cell. Now, with the support of the Mathers Foundation, Zhang is working to realize this potential by developing a CRISPR-based therapeutic that works at the level of RNA and offers a safe, effective route to treating a range of diseases, including diseases of the brain and central nervous system, which are difficult to treat with existing gene therapies. The system, harnessed from cyanobacteria and called CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST), allows efficient introduction of DNA while reducing the potential error-prone steps in the process — adding key capabilities to gene-editing technology and addressing a long-sought goal for precision gene editing.