Joey Mao

Journal article Nature · July 29, 2026 Proteins have evolved over billions of years through coordinated substitutions, insertions and deletions, yet computational protein design cannot fully replicate nature's ability to engineer new proteins from existing templates. Protein language models1-3 ... Full text Link to item Cite

A human-specific enhancer fine-tunes radial glia potency and corticogenesis.

Journal article Nature · July 2025 Humans have evolved an extraordinarily expanded and complex cerebral cortex associated with developmental and gene regulatory modifications1-3. Human accelerated regions (HARs) are highly conserved DNA sequences with human-specific nucleotide substitutions ... Full text Link to item Cite

De novo design of peptide binders to conformationally diverse targets with contrastive language modeling.

Journal article Sci Adv · January 24, 2025 Designing binders to target undruggable proteins presents a formidable challenge in drug discovery. In this work, we provide an algorithmic framework to design short, target-binding linear peptides, requiring only the amino acid sequence of the target prot ... Full text Link to item Cite

Apoptotic cell-derived metabolites in efferocytosis-mediated resolution of inflammation.

Journal article Cytokine & growth factor reviews · December 2021 The resolution of inflammation, as part of standard host defense mechanism, is the process to guarantee timely termination of inflammatory responses and eventual restoration of tissue homeostasis . It is mainly achieved via efferocytosis, during which pro- ... Full text Cite