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

Strucutral insights into the mechanism of Fanzor

August 28, 2024

Xu, Saito, et al. resolve the structures of multiple Fanzor orthologs in complex with their omegaRNAs, highlighting differences in the function of these eukaryotic programmable nucleases. Read more in Cell.

Phage-triggered reverse transcription assembles a toxic repetitive gene from a noncoding RNA

August 29, 2024

Wilkinson et al. discover and determine the mechanism of a reverse-transcriptase defense system that flips the central dogma by encoding a gene in RNA. Read more in Science.

Structure of HNH-Cascade

August 6, 2024

Hirano et al. resolve the structure of a naturally occurring hybrid CRISPR Cascade-HNH system. Read more in Molecular Cell.