Achievement

Interdisciplinary research by a multi-institutional team of IGERT students and faculty has led to improved methods for designing zinc finger DNA binding proteins (ZFPs) that can be used to selectively modify genes or regulatory regions in large genomes. The team’s combined experimental and computational advances led to significant savings in both the time and cost of experiments required to generate ZFPs that function successfully in vivo. Publications describing the work were co-authored by ISU IGERT associates J Sander, P Zaback, D Reyon, and F Fu, working in the groups of D Dobbs (IGERT PI, ISU), D Voytas (former ISU IGERT PI, now at Univ. Minnesota), L Miller (IGERT Advisor, ISU), and JK Joung (Harvard) and appeared in including: Molecular Cell, Nature Protocols, PLoS ONE in 2008 and 2009.