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Jonathan Tang

Harvard Medical School, US
Biography

Jonathan Tang did his undergraduate and Master's studies in University of British Columbia. His Master’s thesis was on the transcriptional mechanisms underlying terminal differentiation of neurons in the fruit fly. During this time he became familiar with the arsenal of genetic tools available to Drosophila and grew to appreciate the power of these tools for elucidating biological mechanisms in animals. He brought this knowledge with me to Harvard University for his PhD in a lab that studies retinal development and circuitry in the mouse. During this time, he came to realize that a bottleneck to studies of complex organisms such as the mouse is availability of genetic tools for manipulating specific cells for experimentation. To facilitate this endeavor, he used nanobodies to develop synthetic systems that can enable the use of transgenic GFP lines for cell-specific gene manipulation. Application of these tools in the thousands of existing GFP lines across model organisms should facilitate studies of biological questions without having to generate redundant transgenic tools for cell-specific manipulations.