NIH has announced Long Cai is a recipient of its prestigious Pioneer Award. This award from the High-Risk, High Reward Research Program supports individual scientists “with outstanding records of creativity pursuing new research directions to develop pioneering approaches to major challenges in biomedical, social science, and behavioral research.” -NIH
The team is celebrating this recognition of Cai Lab’s work in developing seqFISH and other spatial genomics tools, heralding a new paradigm that explores gene expression profiles, lineage, and regulatory information in native tissue context.
The ambitious new direction funded by the Pioneer Award will soon uncover how kinases (proteins that trigger certain cell functions) are organized in individual cells and how these locations drive the signaling networks of whole tissues. Ultimately, the project will map the kinome with a spatial context in both mouse and human cell cultures and in vivo.