A Chinese hamster transcription start site atlas that enables targeted editing of CHO cells

I am a 5th year PhD candidate in the Bioinformatics & Systems Biology program at UC San Diego with Dr. Nathan Lewis as my advisor. I received a B.S in Biology with a minor in computational neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University, working on mu-opioid receptor recycling in Dr. Manoj Puthenveedu's lab. I then worked in Dr. Eric Halgren's lab, using ECog data to understand spatiotemporal patterns in sleep and memory. In the Lewis lab, my dissertation examines different points in the lifecycle of biopharmaceuticals, from production to application, using next-generation sequencing technology. My first project-the topic of my talk today- improves the resolution of the transcription start sites (TSSs) in the Chinese Hamster using comprehensive multi-omics across various tissues. This elucidated regulatory regions such as the TATA box and initiator element, enabled CRISPR activation for the Mgat3 gene, and provided a valuable resource for the CHO community. My second focus is on the application of a novel immuno-therapeutic to the clonal makeup of the hematopoietic CD34+ stem and progenitor cell population. Using a recently published single-cell mitochondrial ATAC-seq methodology for lineage tracing, we tracked clonal population expansions and regressions. I am very interested in genetic engineering in combination with sequencing and modeling techniques, and hope to incorporate these techniques to developing and understanding novel therapeutics.