Category Archives: News

Melissa is now officially the first PhD candidate from the lab – congratulations Melissa!

Sitara and Tim were awarded summer research funding as part of Cornell’s engineering learning initiatives (ELI) program. The ELI program enhances undergraduate learning by providing opportunities for students to engage in cooperative learning and undergraduate research. As part of this program, Sitara and Tim will be working with Sarai and Kyle on continuing to use SHAPE experimentsContinue reading “Sitara and Tim Win ELI Scholarships!”

Julius has been named a 2013 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award recipient. The ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) seeks to identify and support academic scientists and engineers who show exceptional promise for doing creative research. The program aims to attract these rising stars to the Department of Navy’s research program, to support theirContinue reading “Julius awarded ONR Young Investigator Award!”

Ray has been awarded a prestigious Amgen Research Scholarship to perform research at UC Berkeley this summer. The Amgen scholars program provides support for the country’s best and brightest undergraduate researchers to expand their research experiences. It is a highly competitive process and a great honor. Good work Ray!

Since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships have sought to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.  These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in 8 fields in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Previous Sloan Research Fellows include 37 NobelContinue reading “Julius Wins Sloan Research Fellowship!”

Misha and Alex are the two newest undergraduates in the group. Misha will be working with Melissa on engineering RNA circuitry, and Alex will be working with Kyle to dissect RNA structures in the cucumber mosaic virus genome as part of our Gates grant. Welcome to the lab!

The 4th International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering just wrapped up. The entire conference (co-organized by Kristala Prather (MIT) and Ali Khademhosseini (Harvard)) was a fantastic combination of work on synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, protein engineering and the latest biomolecular engineering tools. Julius presented Melissa’s latest work on engineering larger families of orthogonal RNA transcriptional regulatorsContinue reading “Julius gave a talk at the 4th International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering”

Current Protocols in Chemical Biology has just published our SHAPE-Seq protocol paper “SHAPE-Seq: High-Throughput RNA Structure Analysis”. The full text can be found here. This is the best place to start to get a sense of the background behind the technique, and a very detailed step-by-step protocol of all aspects of the protocol including data analysisContinue reading “The SHAPE-Seq protocol paper is online!”

That’s right, SHAPE-Seq has its first official mention on the free online encyclopedia under the Nucleic Acid Structure Determination page. You can see the mention right after theSHAPE section. Here’s to more people using and improving SHAPE-Seq!

Jeff Tabor, a rising star in synthetic biology now at Rice  wrote an excellent news and views article about our recent Nature Methods paper on engineering RNA transcriptional regulators. This is a particularly exciting paper led by Chang Liu in the Arkin Lab (soon to be at UC Irvine) where we were able to convert RNA-based translationContinue reading “Recent RNA transcriptional converter article featured in Nature Methods News and Views”