Experimental Team
NavGene
Project Leads: Isha Soni, Amad Jalil
Members: Isabella Bartmess, Isabella Murray, Avani Ghate, Edward Pandji, Snigdha Jagarlapudi, Stacy Widyono
The NavGene team is using directed evolution to genetically engineer a more thermostable form of the ChlorIscB protein, an evolutionary precursor to Cas9. Their approach is to first generate a mutant library using computational modeling and then perform directed evolution via toxin-antitoxin selection to select the most thermostable variants. NavGene is presently using machine learning software to create a mutant library of ChlorIscB and determine its maximum functional temperature.