Biological aggregates play significant roles in various cellular pathways and human diseases. Focused on the “Chemistry of Biological Aggregates”, the Zhang lab aspires to develop enabling chemical methodologies and solve transformative biological questions. At present, the Zhang lab combines expertise from synthetic chemistry, biological chemistry, cellular biology and chemical biology to develop chemical tools that quantitatively report on the physicochemical changes of biomolecules during processes of phase separation and aggregation. These results have the potential to correlate the physicochemical properties of biological aggregates to their physiological or pathological functions.

Ongoing projects are:

• Develop novel chemical probes that enable super-resolution quantitive imaging, thus measuring the physicochemical properties of biological molecules in live cells at super-resolution;

• Reveal the physical property-function relationship of membraneless organelles, with a focus on understanding how folding/aggregation of proteins affect the function of these organelles;

• Develop novel RNA imaging technologies to enable quantitive imaging of RNA condensates, thus revealing how RNA phase separation affects their biological functions;

• Develop chemical or genetic tools to regulate protein/RNA phase separation and protein aggregation in membraneless organelles, with a focus on RNA binding proteins.