Schmidt Lab
Principal Investigator: Daniel Schmidt
Institution: University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary In 1966, Francis Crick described proteins as one of biology's two "great polymer languages". Despite progress, achieving fluency in this language—full understanding and the ability to engineer synthetic proteins for precise control of biological systems—remains a foundational challenge. Synthetic proteins, exemplified by engineered gene editors and chimeric antigen receptors, hold immense potential for medicine. While computational biology has advanced protein science through predictions of structure, stability, and mutation effects on disease, engineering multi-domain synthetic proteins remains difficult due to complex fitness landscapes. This limits our ability to build sophisticated proteins that integrate multiple inputs to control cellular states. Current biophysics- based models struggle with large multidomain proteins, and designs are constrained by cellular contexts, such as folding and trafficking. To address these challenges, my lab developed a Multiplexed Assays of Variant Effect (MAVE) pipeline that combines engineering comprehensive synthetic protein variant libraries, analyzing their phenotypes in diverse cellular contexts, with data-driven models of p…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM161293-01: Cell Context and Variant Effects: Multiplexed Assays for Synthetic Protein Innovation (2026)
- 5R01GM141152-04: Viral vector technology for cell type specific gene delivery (2025)
- 5R01GM136851-04: Comprehensive mapping of trafficking and functional robustness in Inward Rectifier K+ channels for variant pathogenicity prediction and model-guided engineering of chemogenetic reagents (2024)
- 5R01GM141152-03: Viral vector technology for cell type specific gene delivery (2024)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com