Research Highlights

Nature Microbiology (2020)

Development of the first bacterial high-throughput scRNA-seq

Cell (2020)

CRISPR Adaptation-mediated Library Manufacturing (CALM) facilitates bacterial functional genomics and drug discovery

Cell (2016)

Dual DNA- and RNA-cleavage by CRISPR-Cas10 ensures anti-phage immunity

Nature Biotechnology (2014)

Exploiting CRISPR-Cas9 and phagemid as sequence-specific antimicrobials

Nature Biotechnology (2013)

Development of the first CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology in bacteria

Lab News

Wenyan to Join Mount Sinai as Faculty

2022/07

Wenyan will join Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Mount Sinai in January 2023 as an assistant professor. The Jiang lab is recruiting postocs, graduate students and research associates interested in microbiology, microbial engineering and systems biology. Email Wenyan if you are interested.

Wenyan Named Finalist of 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists

2021/09

Wenyan is named finalist of 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists for his work in bacterial functional genomics and single-cell RNA sequencing.

Wenyan Receives NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) to Study Antimicrobial Resistance

2021/08

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest threats to today’s public health. With the support of this NIH/NIAID grant, Wenyan plans to build novel CRISPR-Cas9 technology to study both the genetic and non-genetic determinants of antimicrobial resistance in pathogenic Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus.

High-throughput Single-cell RNA Sequencing in Bacteria Made Possible, for the First Time

2020/05

We developed the first bacterial high-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology called PETRI-seq (Blattman*, Jiang* et al, Nature Microbiology, 2020). A principally identical method (Kuchina*, Brettner* et al, Science, 2021) was also developed by Georg Seelig’s group at University of Washington. With bacterial scRNA-seq, scientists can now study the gene expression programs of individual cells among complex microbial communities.

Engineered Microbial Biofactory Facilitates CRISPR Functional Genomics and Drug Discovery

2020/03

The CALM (CRISPR Adaptation-mediated Library Manufacturing) technology we developed acts as a biofactory that rapidly generates highly comprehensive genome-scale CRISPR libraries in any bacterium of interest (Jiang et al, Cell, 2020). Using this powerful tool, we aim to identify new druggable targets in pathogenic bacteria.

Development of First CRISPR-Cas9 Genome Editing Technology in Bacteria

2013/01

Wenyan and colleagues pioneered the development of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing (Jiang*, Bikard* et al, Nature Biotechnology, 2013; US Patent: 9822372) and gene expression modulation (Bikard*, Jiang* et al, Nucleic Acids Research, 2013) technologies in bacteria. He was also involved in the development of the first CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology in eukaryotes (Cong*, Ran* et al, Science, 2013).