Invent novel biotechnology leveraging micro/nanoscale mechanics

Electroporation is an approach to transfect cells with foreign molecules by permeabilizing cellular membranes via an electric field. Our laboratory leverages a focused electric field in a micro/nanometer scale to invent new assays for profiling and perturbing cellular states. For instance, our group developed approaches, SINC-seq and NanoSINC-seq, for fractionating cytoplasmic versus nuclear RNAs of single cells by controlling electric fields in a microfluidic system and profiling them with next-generation sequencing. Our approaches demonstrated the integrated analysis of cytoplasmic and nuclear gene expressions of single cells and enabled the investigation of the localization of RNA molecules in subcellular compartments at single-cell resolution. Currently, we are developing new approaches (1) to profile gene expressions of single cells as time series and (2) to jointly profile mechanical phenotype and gene expression in thousands of single cells. We leverage our approaches to dissect the dynamic link between phenotype and gene expression along various biological contexts, including cellular senescence, stemness, and cancer biology.