The Tewhey Lab is working with the Maine CDCP to sequence positive COVID-19 cases within the state of Maine. Our work will help develop an epidemiological narrative based on the genetic fingerprint of the virus in order to better understand how the virus is circulating.
We would like to welcome our new lab members John and Luke who did rotations with us over the winter. John joins us from the Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering at the University of Maine, and Luke joins us from Tufts. Both will be working on continuations of their rotation projects, and we look forward to seeing where they will go!
We have released our preprint on bioRxiv describing HCR-FlowFISH, a flexible phenotyping method for CRISPRi/a screens of cis-regulatory elements. This project is in collaboration with Steve Reilly and Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute and part of our work as an ENCODE Characterization Center.
COVID-19 has upturned many people’s summer/internship plans including Natalia’s. She was initially intending to spend the summer break working on wildlife conservation in Madagascar! Unfortunately, the program was cancelled but lucky for all of us she is back in Maine and will continue working in the lab this summer. Natalia also applied for NSF funding and was recently awarded a fellowship for the summer! Natalia will be extending the work she started last summer as an SSP student investigating synthetic regulatory elements.
We are excited to start a new project with the Siggers and Emili labs at Boston University looking at how cis-regulatory elements are impacted by genetic variation associated with autoimmune diseases. This work is funded by a new R01 awarded to the Siggers lab from the NIH/NIAID. We’re looking forward to a fun five years exploring the regulatory architecture of these regions!