Current areas of research in the Joung lab include:

Engineering “designer” zinc fingers with novel DNA-binding specificities

The Joung lab is a founding member of the Zinc Finger Consortium (http://www.zincfingers.org). As part of this collaborative effort, we have developed robust selection and design methods for rapidly engineering synthetic zinc finger domains with novel, defined DNA-binding specificities.

Designer zinc fingers can be used to target functional domains to specific genomic loci in cells (see below) and analysis of the amino acid sequences and specificities of these artificial fingers will be useful for developing algorithms to predict the DNA-binding specificities of naturally-occurring zinc finger domains.

Application of zinc finger nucleases for targeted, highly efficient genome manipulation

Zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), consisting of designer zinc fingers fused to a non-specific endonuclease domain, can be used to introduce targeted DNA alterations with high efficiency at specific genomic loci in mammalian, plant, zebrafish, or Drosophila cells. These alterations result from repair of ZFN-induced double-stranded DNA breaks by normal cellular repair processes (non-homologous end-joining or homologous recombination).

Ongoing projects in the lab are aimed at optimization of the ZFN genome modification methodology and using it for novel applications in biomedical research and gene therapy.

Altering cellular phenotypes using combinatorial zinc finger transcription factor libraries

We have recently constructed large combinatorial libraries of zinc finger domains which can be fused to various transcriptional regulatory domains (e.g., activation or repression domains).

We are introducing these libraries into human cells to induce specific desired phenotypes and cellular states.