Another banger.

RT @BruriaSamuel: How do plasmids kickstart gene expression in new hosts?. Our new review in Plasmid: “Strategies for zygotic gene expressi….

RT @litcapital: Every second of Coldplay I’ve listened to has been against my will.

I apparently deleted a important “TnpA” label from my poster so now my week is ruined but if you want to help search for more mistakes and you are at the Microbial Populations GRC come see me Wednesday

Last summer I was lucky to attend the Woods Hole Microbial Diversity course and the most important thing I got out of it was meeting Liana. Her genuine curiosity and meticulousness shine in this super fun story on introns (i.e. the coolest RNAs). Excited to see what you do next!.

RT @baym: Observing Shabbat by not engaging with the weird white knighters who think they’re fighting antisemitism by harassing Jewish prof….

“I think that reason is a pretense. I think that this is an attack on Harvard as a symbol of academia in the United States.”.

RT @baym: Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminate….

During my rotation I got to work on this project and I immediately knew I would be a fool to pass up an opportunity to work with @soumya_kannan12 and @altaetran. Super thankful to have met, and learned from, you guys!.

Reposting with an eye catching figure because forgot

And thank you to @MangusoLab and @kathleenbyates for taking a chance on me when no one else would, and to all the people I got to work with and learn from in the lab!.

All in all a super fun project where I first truly learned independence. More importantly I got to work alongside @ibrahimovicious and @PeterMaxAllen and watch them go from bleary eyed fresh from undergrad to fully trained scientists in their own right <3.

In a humanized mouse model our VLPs effectively generated CAR T cells in vivo that were subsequently able to treat a B cell leukemia even better than traditional ex vivo CAR T cells.

Finally, we incorporated co-stimulatory ligands on the surface of the VLPs to create a T cell targeted VLP capable of selectively generating and activating CAR T cells in vitro.

So we spliced the measles envelope with that of the related Dolphin Morbillivirus to create a chimera that maintained fusogenicity with reduced response to measles vaccinated serum.

However, using the measles envelope for in vivo delivery poses a challenge as most of us are immunized against the virus (for the moment that is), so would be neutralized preventing the delivery of cargo. However other related viral envelopes evade anti measles antibodies.

But we found that scFvs overall impede surface expression and function of the MeV envelope. Nanobodies (i.e. llama antibodies) on the other hand can effectively re-target the MeV envelope without preventing expression.

We started with the measles virus envelope that can be redirected using to a receptor of choice with the addition of a targeting domain - usually an scFv.

Llamas, dolphins and measles? Oh my!. So thankful this story is finally breaking containment from my time in the @MangusoLab. Using pieces from viruses and llamas we engineered selective cell specific viral like particles with reduced immunogenicity for in vivo gene delivery.