Karen Huilin Zhang

The paper describes a non-canonical mechanism in Type VI retrons where reverse transcribed ssDNA derepresses translation of an antiviral toxin, providing phage defense without detectable msDNA.

The paper isolates and characterizes novel retrons from environmental bacteria, tests their phage defense mechanisms, and engineers them for genome editing in E. coli.

This paper introduces a new class of reporter proteins that can be directly detected using nanopore sensors for multiplexed, real-time gene expression tracking.

Porcupine enables rapid, reliable, and lab-free molecular tagging of physical objects using nanopore-orthogonal DNA strands for custom labels.