Dr. Cheng’s laboratory in recent years has been focusing on developing technologies and laboratory procedures to enable high throughput functional studies of genes. One such example is the development of a semi-automated synthetic DNA assembly and cloning pipeline at the JGI. In addition to help managing activities of the DNA synthesis pipeline at JGI, his group has been developing a generalizable strategy for strain engineering capability to manipulate DNA sequences inside bacteria and yeast cells with no need of prior genetic tools. This technology will further facilitate functional exploration of sequenced genomes.
Research Team
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Jan-Fang Cheng, PI | Hualan Liu, Project Scientist | Yan Liang, Principal Research Associate | David Robinson, Senior Research Associate | Rita Kuo, Senior Research Associate |
| JFCheng@lbl.gov | hualanliu@lbl.gov | yliang@lbl.gov | dsrobinson@lbl.gov | rckuo@lbl.gov |
| Hualan is leading the efforts of designing genetic tools and procedures to domesticate bacterial species in multiple phyla | Yan is working on in situ microbiome strain engineering. | Dave is working on prokaryotic host engineering. | Rita is developing genetic tools for eukaryotic host engineering. |
Jan-Fang Cheng Bio
Following the postdoctoral training, Dr. Cheng joined the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1989, which later became the Joint Genome Institute in 1997. During this time, he led the efforts of generating clone-based maps and localizing novel transcripts on human chromosome 21. His group has also completed the chromosomes 5 clone-base maps as a part of the human genome project. In early 2000, he co-led a program project that utilizes comparative genomics approach to identify evolutionarily conserved noncoding elements and understand how they regulate expression of genes. In 2006, Dr. Cheng led the process optimization and the cloning technology groups at the JGI where his group had developed applications and improved technologies of next generation sequencing and sequencing library construction. In 2011, he has become the functional genomics group lead that oversees the operation of micro-scale application and synthetic biology groups and plays a leading role in developing technologies to improve single cell genomics and enable in vivo genomic DNA engineering.
Education
- BS in Agronomy, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
- MS in Genetics, Pennsylvania State University, PA
- PhD in Molecular Cell Biology, Pennsylvania State University, PA
- Postdoctoral training in Genetics and Development, Columbia University, NY