Jiang Lab
Principal Investigator: Wenyan Jiang
Institution: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, NY)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Rationale: Genetic interaction (GI) networks reveal fundamental principles of cellular biology, including gene functions, rules governing cellular organization, and synthetic lethality landscapes. However, a comprehensive GI network is lacking in bacteria. To date, only ~10% of all possible digenetic interactions have been mapped in Escherichia coli, one of the best-studied bacteria. Moreover, the systems genomics infrastructure required to construct GI networks is absent in many bacterial species due to low transformability (ie, genetic recalcitrance). These limitations have severely hindered our ability to investigate gene function and genetic architecture across diverse bacteria. As a result, at least 30% of prokaryotic genes still have unknown functions. Objective: (1) In the first part of this R35 project, we will develop a barcoded CRISPR strategy to systematically profile, for the first time, all pairwise GIs (~10 million) in E. coli. This effort will generate the first comprehensive bacterial GI network that captures both synergistic and antagonistic interactions. In parallel, we will construct a gene similarity network that defines functional relationships…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM165818-01: Toward a Comprehensive Genetic Interaction Network in Bacteria (2026)
- 5R00AI153530-04: New CRISPR tools for systematic interrogation of genetic and transcriptional determinants of antibiotic sensitivity in bacteria (2024)
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