Home Department: Materials Science & Engineering
Mentor: Stanley Qi, Bioengineering and Chemical & Systems Biology

“Using CRISPR-Based Systems in Epigenetic Screening for Advanced Gene Regulation”

Developing CRISPR systems into tools for durably altering gene expression, such as silencing, could have many therapeutic outcomes. Directly editing the genome is challenging and may have unforeseeable implications. Employing epigenetic mechanisms that regulate gene expression could instead allow long-term silencing of genes without making irreversible modifications to DNA sequences. Alexis will be optimizing and testing a new technology within the CRISPR system that can silence genes in this way and developing a high-throughput screen to understand how to maximize silencing across a range of genes.