Dawn Chen
@dawnchenx
PhD Student @Harvard @insitubiology. ex-@Google. Nice to meet you.
Our paper on continuous mutagenesis in living cells using HACE is now out in @ScienceMagazine! We now demonstrate that HACE continuously generates mutations over a 10-day period and enables targeting using dCas9 without introducing DNA nicks. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
‘RNA writing’ is latest tech to emerge in race to edit large blocks of genetic material. My story for @endpts on the method that hijacks RNA splicing to replace swathes of mRNA. Scientists say it's like the RNA version of prime editing or DNA writing. 🧵 endpts.com/rna-writing-is…
We're thrilled to introduce PromoterAI — a tool for accurately identifying promoter variants that impact gene expression. 🧵 (1/)
The peer-reviewed version of expansion in situ genome sequencing is now out in Science! The news is bittersweet – when we first revealed this last September, I never guessed it would be my final paper in academia, but a lot has changed. A few parting thoughts:
Thrilled to share our latest work in which we built a tool to assay RNA content of various subcellular compartments within native cellular and tissue context! @UTSWGreenCenter @UTSWMedCenter nature.com/articles/s4146…
Very happy! Thank you to @WeintraubAward, my lab @insitubiology, all my mentors, collaborators, family and friends for your support!
A huge congratulations to the recipients of the 2025 Weintraub Award! These ten exceptional graduate students exemplify the bold, creative, and pioneering spirit embodied by Dr. Hal Weintraub. fredhutch.org/en/news/releas…
Today in @Nature we share our back-to-back stories with @nzhenguw revealing chemical-genetic convergence between a molecular glue & E3 ligase cancer mutations. 1/6
Excited to share our lab's first preprint: we used spatial transcriptomics to dissect how aging disrupts the cycling ovary! 🧵 This was an incredible team effort w/ @jenngarrison @Tammyinlab @davidsebfischer AlisonKochersberger @RuthRaichur @sophiamszady
Amazing work from my labmate, check it out!
We’re excited to share our latest computational method, TissueMosaic, for comparative analysis of spatial transcriptomic datasets across conditions! (1/5) biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
It was so cool to learn about your research!
Honoured to be featured in the @RNASociety spotlight series this week. Much obliged to Dr. @DLKPhD, @dawnchenx and @ChandramaMM for everything
Honored to be featured by the RNA Society this week! Huge thanks to @dawnchenx and @AnnaSherwoodRNA for their fantastic write-up.
We are delighted to announce our next RNA Society Member Spotlight! rnasociety.org/dr--zhangli-su Dr. Zhangli Su is an Assistant Professor of Genetics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In this RNA spotlight, written by Dawn Chen and edited by Dr. Anna Sherwood, Dr. Su…
Thrilled, and also in a bit of disbelief, to see our paper featured on the cover of @ScienceMagazine! "Finding Neo" wasn't easy, but we just kept swimming (read: stared at a sequence of DNA) until the Eureka moment hit.
The central dogma of molecular biology states that genetic information flows from DNA and RNA to protein, with reverse transcription converting RNA to DNA. In the pursuit of understanding how bacteria defend themselves from viral infection, two groups have found alternative…
Today out in @biorxivpreprint we present SCOPE. An optics-free, self-registering array of DNA encoded beads for spatial genomics. This was work led by the intrepid duo of Hanna Liao and Sanjay Kottapalli, with @JShendure's lab. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Our story on RNA-templated gene synthesis in antiviral immunity is out today in @ScienceMagazine! We discovered a cryptic gene, neo, that is created de novo by infected cells in a remarkable feat of molecular gymnastics🤸 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
We developed an imaging-free spatial genomics technology where DNA barcodes diffuse to connect locally. Using UMAP, we reconstructed the physical locations of these barcodes, transforming spatial transcriptomics into purely molecular biology. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Nice. Much better evaluation of DNA LMs on actually important tasks specifically focused on 3'-UTR. Motif discovery, variant scoring and MPRA activity prediction, mRNA half life prediction. 1/
Investigating the performance of foundation models on human 3'UTR sequences biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_bioinfo