A chat with Hui Yang

Conversations with scientists

Today’s episode is with and about Hui Yang. Dr. Yang is a researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience at Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has developed new base-editor variants. Base-editing is a kind of gene-editing. Overall the result led to base-editors with fewer off-targets, high on-target efficiency and a narrowed editing window, fewer indels and fewer off-targets, he says. Yang sees a lot of promise for these base editors for both DNA and RNA base editing.

Yang is a die-hard Manchester United. Among other aspects, he talks about how he organizes his lab for open communication. He is modeling the the culture of the Jaenisch lab at The Whitehead Institute. That's where Yang was a postdoctoral fellow.