Zehan Zhou

PhD student in the Doudna lab. Interested in all things RNA!

[Samuel Hume @DrSamuelBHume]

One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a standing ovation for the full Daraxonrasib results

I feel inspired and energised, to put it mildly — we have a targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer now, and nothing is undruggable anymore

[Matthew Kan, MD, PhD @matthewjkan]

Honored to receive the inaugural “Above and Beyond” award from the @ClinImmSoc, alongside Xiao Peng, Josh Milner, and Jennifer Puck, for our efforts to organize newborn screening for inborn errors of immunity by genomic sequencing!

[Jingkun Zeng 曾京昆 @JingkunZeng]

Thrilled to share our new preprint from the Doudna Lab!

“Undruggable” cancer mutations remain very hard to target with current modalities. What if we could instead sense mutant transcripts and convert that recognition into selective cell killing?

https://t.co/AOOFJcM0A1

[Kenneth Loi @kenjmloi]

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR.

We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets.

Thread + link below.

[Peter Wang @wyppeter]

Excited to share the published version of our work @Nature! We revealed the mechanism + structural basis of microRNA degradation, and showed how ZSWIM8 defines a novel class of Cullin–RING E3 ligases + targets an asymmetric substrate as a dimer + uses RNAs in recognition. [1/2]

[Zehan Zhou @ZehanZhou]

🧵8/8 Huge shoutout to the amazing four labs of our collaboration: Jennifer Doudna's lab @SJacobsenUCLA Zev Bryant's lab and @SavageCatsOnly , my world-class co-first authors Irenka Saffarian-Deemyad @honglue1 @TrevorWeiss480 and our amazing co-authors!!!

[Zehan Zhou @ZehanZhou]

How do the ancestors of CRISPR-Cas unwind DNA and how can this lead to better genome editing? With our collaboration between Jennifer Doudna's lab x @SJacobsenUCLA x Zev Bryant's lab x @SavageCatsOnly we've uncovered the secrets behind TnpB's dynamics!
🔗https://t.co/inEuLC1Rlr

[Zehan Zhou @ZehanZhou]

🧵7/8 From this, we think that Ymu1 TnpB genome editing occurs in a stepwise basis and can be stabilized at each distinct stage! As long as you modulate individual checkpoints, you can make a highly efficient and compact genome editor 🧪

[Isabel Esain @isabelesain]

✨Excited to share our work on AI-guided design of minimal RNA-guided nucleases! Huge honor working with @PetrSkopintsev, @evandeturk, Jennifer Doudna, Jamie Cate, Jill Banfield, Steve Jacobsen, and all co-authors in a multi-lab collaboration🧬
🧵1/4

[nature @Nature]

Nature research paper: Design of highly functional genome editors by modelling CRISPR–Cas sequences

https://t.co/6KNd7YM9TS

[Savage Lab @SavageCatsOnly]

What's better than 1 deep mutational scanning (DMS) library? 2! In a new pre-print @BW_Thornton and @rachelfweissman et al. map the mutational landscape of ISDra2 TnpB protein and reRNA and leverage these datasets to engineer highly active variants (1/9)

[Ben Adler @ben_a_adler]

It is finally out!

Muntathar Al-Shimary, Doudna Lab, @bradyfcress and I present a gene knockdown tool that works in diverse phages: CRISPRi through antisense RNA Targeting (CRISPRi-ART)!

Check out the final paper in @NatureMicrobiol
https://t.co/DJkBM5fhPL

[Brigette Manohar @BrigetteManohar]

Grateful for the opportunity to join @lateefahsimon & @tedlieu at the IGI to discuss how cuts in NIH funding will directly impact grad students like myself. These cuts don’t just stall research—they threaten our careers, training, and the future of scientific innovation.

[Michael Fischbach @mfgrp]

Today we report that an engineered skin bacterium, swabbed gently on the head of a mouse, can unleash a potent antibody response against a pathogen. Could lead to topical vaccines that are applied in a cream. @DjenetBousbaine led the charge... @Nature 1/55