Evolving Deaminases for Epigenetic Profiling and Gene Editing

Date: 14^th August, 2026 (Friday)

Time: 5 - 6 pm (HKT)

 

Venue: Lecture Theatre P1, Chong Yuet Ming Chemistry Building

 

 

Department of Chemistry

The University of Chicago 

 

Weixin Tang received her B.S. in Chemistry and Biology from Tsinghua University and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Upon completing postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Chicago as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in 2019, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025. The Tang Lab innovates precision medicine by enzyme engineering and high-throughput discovery.

 

N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A), the most prevalent internal mRNA modification in higher eukaryotes, depicts a regulatory network extensively involved in the mRNA life cycle. To elucidate the multitude of functions served by m⁶A, we developed evolved TadA-assisted N⁶-methyladenine sequencing (eTAM-seq), an enzyme-assisted sequencing technology that detects and quantifies m⁶A by global adenosine deamination. With eTAM-seq, we profiled m⁶A in the transcriptomes of cell lines and mouse tissues. I will discuss development, applications, and current limitations of eTAM-seq.

 

For the second half of my talk, I will present our recent progress on precision base editing. More than half of pathogenic point mutations in humans are, in principle, amenable to base editing, but their correction is often limited by bystander editing of neighboring bases (occurring to >80% of the pool). I will present our efforts to engineer base editors with programmable context specificity, which enables precise correction of disease-causing mutations while reducing both bystander and off-target editing.