The 2020 Fellow is Junjie Wang!
Dr. Wang is a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Prof. Brian Chait at the Rockefeller University. Dr. Wan’t work focuses on developing experimental and computational methods for mass spectrometry.
Working with members of the Chait and Rout labs, he has developed multiple computational tools: CX-Circos, a highly versatile web-based tool for visualization and analysis of chemical cross-linking data that incorporates a variety of structural and statistical information into a single layout of connectivity graphs for in-depth analysis and biological insights; CX-Validator, a tool that hierarchically sorts CX-MS results into protein-, restraint- and peptide-specific groups for thorough validation of the results. CX-Circos has been used by our groups for assessing multiple thousands of cross-links within the yeast nuclear pore complex as well as in many other proteinaceous assemblies. In addition, this online tool has been used by over a thousand researchers worldwide.
Dr. Wang has also made significant improvements to the identification pipeline for antigen-specific nanobodies: a middle-down mass spectrometry approach that unambiguously identifies the sequences of abundant species from highly complex mixture of nanobodies; a gel slicing approach that enables deep proteome profiling and assists CDR pairing for the classic bottom-up approach; a comprehensive analysis pipeline narrowing down the nanobody candidates from 100 thousands to hundreds, at a high true positive assessment rate and with maximized diversity. These approaches accelerate the identification of potent anti-viral nanobodies that target a wide range of epitopes for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
He also worked on novel acquisition approaches to advance the capabilities of commercial mass spectrometers to deal with challenging biological samples, including the use of single-ion mass spectrometry, intelligent data acquisition and deep assessment of raw data.