Sustaining Innovation Postdocs and Projects

Dr Zhiqiang Zhang

Translational Biology, Astex Pharmaceuticals

Fragment-based drug discovery has the potential to identify novel druggable sites on proteins, but the biological relevance of these sites is frequently unclear. My project aims to use tiled genome editing (a technique in which all regions of a given gene can be altered) as a functional genetics approach to address this issue and to identify regions of proteins that are required for protein function. Overlaying the data from tiled genome editing screens with structural information of the target protein will allow us to pursue those novel druggable sites in the regions of biological relevance.