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Silvana Konermann
@SKonermann
Cofounder @arcinstitute and Assistant Professor @Stanford. HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow. CRISPR, RNA and Alzheimer’s via @salkinstitute, @MIT and @eth
California, USA
Joined October 2012
Posts
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    We are really grateful to work with OpenAI Foundation to advance @arcinstitute's Alzheimer's initiative! We designed Arc in part to tackle Alzheimer's, since it's the archetypal complex disease. Our goal is to model and understand how genes and environment shape risk a complex
    Alzheimer’s is one of the most devastating diseases, killing ~2 million people globally each year and costing over $1 trillion annually. It also remains one of the hardest unsolved problems in medicine. We believe advanced AI can help change that: openaifoundation.org/news/ai-for-al…
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    I am incredibly excited to announce arcinstitute.org after nearly two years in the making. @arcinstitute is a new, nonprofit research institute launched in collaboration with @Stanford, @UCSF, and @UCBerkeley that will focus on complex diseases.
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    Just checked their results. The similarity is spurious. Out of 4 inserts they identify between NCov and SARS, 2 are found in bat coronavirus. Of the remaining two, only one is most similar to HIV, and is so short (6 AA) that the similarity is not higher than chance given database
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    1/The success of DNA-targeted CRISPR screens means that we’ve all been excited to enable RNA screens using CRISPR. I’m excited to share latest paper from my + @pdhsu’s labs, led by my student @JingyiWei4, who's developed Cas13d for high-throughput RNA screens using deep learning.
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    I'm excited for this fundamental new RNA-guided mechanism out of @arcinstitute to come out today in back-to-back papers in @Nature.
    🧬Introducing a powerful, programmable new mechanism for genome design: DNA recombination with bridge RNAs. As the first natural RNA-guided DNA recombinase, this system enables insertion, excision, or inversion of any two DNA sequences. Out today in @Nature, led by Arc
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    Replying to @SKonermann and @Dereklowe
    The other novel insert between the bat coronavirus glycoprotein and NCoV is more similar to 13 viruses besides HIV and none of those similarities is higher than chance (given insert size/viral protein database size)
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    Excited to report this new study advancing RNA targeting CRISPR systems along three key parameters: efficiency, cellular toxicity/specificity, and size—all made possible with machine learning and metagenomic mining. Work done at my and @pdhsu's labs at @arcinstitute. More👇
    Excited to share our latest work 'Deep learning and CRISPR-Cas13d ortholog discovery for optimized RNA targeting'! Posted as an update but greatly expanded our previous story - we identified a new Cas13d ortholog with low toxicity and collateral effects! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
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    Excited to be launching this resource @arcinstitute for the scientific community today with the first 300M cells, including 100M cells with chemical perturbations!
    Today, we're launching the Arc Virtual Cell Atlas, a growing resource for computation-ready single-cell measurements. As the initial contributions, @vevo_ai has open sourced Tahoe-100M, the world's largest single-cell dataset, mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions, and we’re
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    Excited to share this paper from the lab, by my first PhD student @JingyiWei4, who's also defending tomorrow! It's been a longstanding goal of mine since the end of my own PhD to create RNA targeting tools that really work, and this a clear step in that direction.
    🧬New paper + tool out of @pdhsu @SKonermann Labs, led by @StanfordBioE Ph.D. student @JingyiWei4: a new RNA targeting CRISPR enzyme paired with a convolutional neural network (CNN) model predicting highly efficient guide RNA sequences for transcriptome engineering.
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    A new major collaborative project across the @BrianHie and Hsu labs, @arcinstitute and @StanfordEng - we’re excited for the future of foundation models in biology at Arc!
    Is DNA all you need? In new work, we report Evo, a genomic foundation model that learns across the fundamental languages of biology: DNA, RNA, and proteins. Evo is capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale.
    GIF
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    Glad to be able to share fastgrants.org for COVID-19. Meant to overcome challenges for academic researchers currently working on COVID-19 in finding the time to put together a long grant and waiting months for a funding decision for this urgent work. Please apply!
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    Couldn't be more thrilled with the result of our faculty searches at @arcinstitute over the past year and to welcome these amazing scientists to Arc. Welcome @FelixHorns @ishahjain @ChristophThaiss @UcheMedoh @MaayanLevy_Lab Theo Roth @weallen1! This was made possible thanks to
    💡Arc was founded so that brilliant minds can pursue their boldest ideas. Announcing the newest Investigators and Awardees joining the Arc community! These exceptional scientists are pioneering research into critical questions about complex human disease. Welcome to: 🧑‍🔬Core
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    Excited to share this new work from @arcinstitute-- led by graduate student @sitaritapita and undergrad @cyrus_tau with @pdhsu. Building on our previous work on Cas13d-based RNA targeting we can now write full sequences into endogenous RNA!
    Replying to @pdhsu
    For this collaboration with @SKonermann, we invented two RNA editing modules using orthogonal RNA-targeting effectors: a trans-splicing RNA recruited by our previously discovered Cas13d, and a cis-splicing interference complex (CIM) promoted by Cas7-11 for a 20X efficiency boost
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    It’s an exciting day for us at Arc as we welcome the newest members of our scientific community, across our Institute programs after two years of building Arc!
    🧠At Arc, we believe great science happens when creative minds can pursue their boldest ideas. Today, we welcome new researchers to the Arc community to conduct curiosity-driven, collaborative research into complex diseases—from cancer to conditions like autoimmune dysfunction.