Chavez Lab
Principal Investigators
Our research group strives to push the boundaries of genetic engineering by developing new methods with which to modify and regulate eukaryotic genomes. We apply these tools ourselves or through collaboration to gain fundamental biological insights with a particular focus towards understanding neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Our work employs a variety of techniques ranging from oligo chip synthesis and library-based screening to iPS cell differentiation and live-cell imaging. We utilize a variety of model systems ranging from yeast to human cell culture to assure that the technologies we generate are applicable to a broad swath of the scientific community.
In collaboration with members of the motor neuron center, we are currently developing high-throughput methods for interrogating multiple neurodegenerative disease models in parallel. We plan to apply our system to explore the mechanisms through which neurodegenerative disease-associated proteins cause cellular toxicity.
Lab Members
Select Publications
#Yeo, N-C., *#Chavez, A., Lance-Byrne, A., Chan, Y., Menn, D., Milanova, D., Kuo, C-C., Guo, X., Sharma, S., Tung, A., Cecchi, R.J., Tuttle, M., Pradhan, S., Lim, E.T., Davidsohn, N., Ebrahimkhani, M.R., Collins, J.J., Lewis, N.E., *Kiani, S., *Church, G.M., An enhanced CRISPR repressor for targeted mammalian gene regulation. Nature Methods. 2018; doi: 10.1038/s41592-018-0048-5.
#Guo, X., *#Chavez, A., #Tung, A., Chan, Y., Kaas, C., Yin, Y., Cecchi, R., Garnier, S.L., Kelsic, E.D., Schubert, M., DiCarlo, J.E., Collins, J.J., *Church, G.M., High-throughput creation and functional profiling of DNA sequence variant libraries using CRISPR–Cas9 in yeast. Nature Biotechnology. 2018; doi:10.1038/nbt.4147.
*#Chavez, A., #Pruitt, B.W., Tuttle, M., Shapiro, R.S., Cecchi, R.J., Winston, J., Turczyk, B.M., Tung, M., Collins, J.J., and Church, G.M*. Precise Cas9 targeting enables genomic mutation prevention. bioRxiv. 2016