Lab News

Mandy has just been awarded the Pioneer Fellowship which will allow her to transform her fundamental research into a startup focused on new treatments for blood disorders. The Pioneer Fellowship is hosted by the ETH Innovation & Entrepreneurship Lab.

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Kazuto is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan. He received the JSPS grant for the Promotion of Joint International Research to study mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas3 mediated genome editing in human cells. He joined the Corn lab in November 2020 and his stay for the research is scheduled for a period of 12 months.

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Grégoire has received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Physiopathology from the University of Bordeaux (France) in December 2019 in the lab of Prof. Moreau-Gaudry. He joined the Corn lab as a post-doctoral researcher in January 2021. His research interests include gene editing and monogenic diseases, with a special focus on gene therapy of sickle cell disease.

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Magda is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry Polish Academy of Sciences. In this academic year, she received the Etiuda 8 grant which is dedicated to young scientists who want to do an internship abroad. Magda has been using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to shorten mutated CAG repeat tract in genes associated with polyQ disorders. Her scholarship is scheduled for 6 months.

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escholarship.org

Flipping the Hemoglobin Switch and Discovering Regulators Involved in Fetal Hemoglobin Reactivation

Author(s): Boontanrart, Mandy | Advisor(s): Corn, Jacob E | Abstract: The fetal to adult hemoglobin switch is a developmental process by which fetal hemoglobin becomes silenced after birth and replaced by adult hemoglobin. Diseases caused by defective or missing adult hemoglobin, such as Sickle Cell Disease or β-Thalassemia, can be ameliorated by reactivating fetal hemoglobin. We discovered that knockdown or knockout of β-globin, a subunit of adult hemoglobin, led to robust upregulation of γ-globin, a subunit of fetal hemoglobin. This phenomenon suggested that red blood cells have an inherent ability to upregulate fetal hemoglobin in the event that adult hemoglobin is lacking.We developed multiple gene-editing tools in an immortalized erythroid cell model to investigate the molecular mechanisms behind the increase in fetal hemoglobin. Time-course transcriptomics identified ATF4, a transcription factor, as a causal regulator of this response. Further analysis also converged upon downregulation of MYB and BCL11A, known repressors of γ-globin, described in detail in chapter 2. Further work in chapter 3 explores other possible fetal hemoglobin regulators as discovered by CRISPRi arrayed mediated knockdown experiments. This work furthers our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of gene regulation and how cellular and molecular events influence red blood cell differentiation.

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Eric joined the Corn lab as a Postdoc in November 2020. He has received his PhD in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics from the University of Minnesota in 2020 in the lab of Dr. Wendy Gordon. He is interested in studying synthetic lethalities and viabilities in DNA repair utilizing CRISPR.

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Roman joined the Corn lab in October 2020. Earlier this year he has received his Ph.D. from the University of Boulder, where he had developed tools by combining CRISPR and aptamer components in the group of Prof. Batey. He is currently interested in finding new ways to understand DNA damage repair and developing new tools to easily modify DNA.

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Susanne joined the Corn Lab in September 2020 to support the team with High Throughput sequencing applications. She received her PhD in Paleogenomics at the University of Mainz. Susanne has a long history in Next Generation Sequencing, starting with sequencing of ancient genomes. After working in a clinical setting, she supported several research groups of the University/ETH Zurich in their genomics and transcriptomics applications using Illumina workflows. Susanne will be working at GEML implementing new protocols and sequencing strategies in genome editing workflows.

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John received his PhD in Oncology from the University of Oxford in 2020, working with Prof. Kristijan Ramadan on the molecular mechanisms of DNA-protein crosslink repair. He joined the Corn Lab as a postdoctoral researcher in October 2020. His research interests include multiplexed genome engineering, DNA repair, and synthetic lethality.

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