User:Ahorwitz

For the past two years, I have been a postdoctoral fellow in Wendell Lim's lab at UCSF. In my regular work, I am trying to understand how positive feedback at the level of the histone tail contributes to the unique properties of heterochromatin. To approach this problem, I want to "abstract" heterochromatin away from complex endogenous loci towards minimal systems that may reveal fundamental properties of silencing. In other words, to do biochemistry in vivo. Of course, heterochromatin also turns out to be a pretty nice tool/part for synthetic biology, something that we explored for iGEM this summer.

This is my second year participating in iGEM--I had so much fun the first time that I had to come back. Last year I was Jimmy's buddy, but this year he went pro, leaving me to help coordinate scientific aspects of the project. When I'm not in lab, I might be found trying to ride my bike up one of the ridiculously steep hills of San Francisco, or attempting to regain my former standing on the lab squash ladder (Curse you Andrej!!).

(Or you can choose different headings. But you must have a team page, a project page, and a notebook page.)