NITMB Lab Days: Tours of the Basu and Drummond Labs

Overview

We are pleased to announce the second in our series of lab tours with hosting labs at the University of Chicago campus, Hyde Park! 

To foster collaboration between mathematicians/theorists and experimentalists in biological fields, we have organized a series of field trips to NITMB labs, followed by casual bag lunches on site with the teams giving the tours and sharing their research. Faculty, students, postdocs, and research scientists in mathematics, physics, and computer science who are curious about the research of NITMB experimentalists are welcome to join us on these tours, regardless of university affiliation. We welcome any cross-campus collaborations that result. 

To participate in these tours November 2nd at the University of Chicago, register HERE
(The registration will ask if you have transportation to the University of Chicago, or if you’d need to meet at NITMB downtown first and have transportation provided. We will follow up.) 

Schedule:  

The Basu Lab:
The Basu Lab conducts interdisciplinary research combining physics, genomics, molecular biology, and materials science to study complex biological systems at single-cell resolution and high throughput in native environments. Her lab develops microfluidics, next-generation sequencing, and physical-chemical tools to profile single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomes and epigenomes across mammalian and microbial systems. Their work, including projects on the Human Cell Atlas, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, End Stage Renal Disease, host-pathogen interactions, and drug testing, aims to build better cell taxonomies, connect epigenomics to transcription, and decipher inter-cellular interactions in healthy and diseased environments. 

The Drummond Lab: 

The Drummond Lab studies how cells adapt to environmental changes at the molecular level, focusing on adaptive biomolecular condensation, which is a process where proteins and RNA assemble into concentrated bodies during stresses like heat shock. Using budding yeast (S. cerevisiae) as a model, the lab combines in vivo imaging, in vitro reconstitution, mechanistic biochemistry, quantitative proteomics, and molecular evolutionary analyses. Their research centers on three main areas: 

• Adaptive Condensation: Demonstrating that stress-triggered protein/mRNA condensation is an evolutionarily tuned signal rather than mere damage, including the discovery of translation-initiation-inhibited condensates (TIICs). 

• Chaperone Regulation: Investigating how molecular chaperones regulate, disperse, and reshape biomolecular condensates. 

• Temperature Sensing: Uncovering how phase-separating proteins act as molecular thermometers to sense temperature changes and drive cellular responses.