Older News
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FRQNT New Investigator Award
Kachroo_Lab receives the FRQNT New Investigator Award.
We thank FRQNT and the reviewers for positive criticism, tremendous enthusiasm and endorsement of our research program.
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Farhat Zafar receives CMAP Internship Award
Farhat Zafar, a Master’s student associated with the SynBioApps program, receives CMAP Internship Award. She will visit Dr. Fritz Roth’s lab at the University of Toronto and work on deep-scanning mutagenesis of a human gene to identify disease-variants. CONGRATULATIONS.
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Kachroo_Lab in the news
How genome sequencing will make you healthier
$1.65M for synthetic biology research and training at Concordia
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Ren receives the NSERC USRA fellowship
Ms. Ren, who is currently a BIOL490 undergraduate student in the lab, received the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award to continue her work in the lab throughout summer 2019. Congratulations!
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Kachroo Lab receives first research grants
Kachroo Lab received the first competitive NSERC Discovery research grant from NSERC. Dr. Aashiq Kachroo was also awarded CRC Tier 2 position in Systems and Synthetic Biology. Kachroo Lab received generous support for infrastructure from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. We thank the NSERC for their support towards developing Early Career Researchers. We also thank reviewers for positive criticism, tremendous enthusiasm and endorsement of our research program. -
New students join the lab
Welcome! Farhat Zafar, Devina Singh, Sarmin Sultana and Courtney Gamache. They all joined the Kachroo Lab as Master’s students in 2018 and the begining of 2019.
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Congratulations to Mudabir Abdullah for his selection to attend 'Yeast Genetics & Genomics 2018' at CSHL, NY
Many congratulations to Mudabir Abdullah for his selection in a highly competitive and prestigious ‘Yeast Genetics & Genomics 2018’ course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA. He also received HHMI sponsored fellowship to cover partial cost of the course. We thank the organizers and the sponsors for this honor. While Mudabir is preparing hard on bench for this course, he is especially training for the famous ‘Plate race’ that has been a critical part of this course!!! We wish him well for both.
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Single Step Precision Genome Editing in Yeast using CRISPR-Cas9
We recently published a protocol on Single-step Precision Genome Editing in Yeast Using CRISPR-Cas9. This protocol can be used to precisely modify any location in the yeast genome (essential or non-essential) without the need for intermnediate strains carrying antibiotic or auxotrophic markers. We successfully demonstrated the protocol in our recent publication Systematic Bacterilazation of Yeast Genes by functionally replacing essential yeast genes with their bacterial or human orthologs. This protocol can be used to add N-terminal or C-terminal tags and introduce site-specific muations in yeast genes using appropriate repair templates (HDR-Homology Directed Repair) or simply just randomly mutating yeast genes (via NHEJ-Non-Homologous End Joining) without any repair template.
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New students joining the lab
Welcome! Mudabir Abdullah, a Masters student from the University of Kashmir. He did his post Master’s Research fellowship at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore under the supervision of Prof. Sandhya S. Visweswariah. Welcome Mudabir!
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New students joining the lab
Welcome! Brittany Greco, an undergrdate in Cell & Molecular Biology, joined Kachroo Lab.
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Our Lab is recruiting.
Kachroo lab is looking for talented graduate students. The selected candidates will be supported by funding from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University. The prospective students will work at Canada’s first Genome Foundry for Synthetic Biology research. Check the advertisement here. And follow the instrutions for application here.
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Bacterialization of yeast genes
In June 2017, we published our work on systematic bacterialization of essential genes in baker’s yeast in eLife journal. This work showed that many essential yeast genes can be replaced by their bacterial counterparts, despite over 2 billion years of evolutionary divergence between prokaryotes and eukaryotes identifying ancient heme biosynthesis as a universally swappable pathway.
This work was highlighted even before publication at Science News, The Daily Texan. A simplified description of the work is available at eLife digest.
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Humanization of yeast genes
In 2015, we published an article on systematic replacement of essential genes in baker’s yeast with corresponding human orthologs. This work demonstrated that nearly 50% of the essential yeast genes can be replaced by their human counterparts, despite over a billion years of evolutionary divergence between humans and yeast. We discovered that metabolic pathways and protein complexes were either entirely replaceable or not.
My lab at Concordia university will expand on this work to fully humanize genetic systems in yeast.
This article was highlighted at many news and other media outlets, links to which are provided below:
The UT Austin press release on this study is available here, and Science Magazine published a news feature on this study here.
Other news features on this paper: phys.org – Discovery News – The Scientist – Science daily – MeteoWeb (in Italian) – NBC News – Washington Post – Reddit #1 – Science News – Empire State Tribune – Softpedia – Reddit #2 – Daily Mail – redOrbit – Medical Daily – NYC Today – Genetic Literacy Project – Techie News – Tech Times – American Live Wire – Pioneer News – Yahoo News – IFLScience – yeastgenome.org – Ottawa Citizen – PRI
Radio shows and podcasts: npr – Science Friday – Science Magazine podcast – Texas Science podcast – BacterioFiles