Scholars@Duke
Emma Jean Chory

Emma Jean Chory CV

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
CV

Selected Publications

High-throughput approaches to uncover synergistic drug combinations in leukemia.

Journal Article SLAS discovery : advancing life sciences R & D · June 2023 We report a comprehensive drug synergy study in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In this work, we investigate a panel of cell lines spanning both MLL-rearranged and non-rearranged subtypes. The work comprises a resource for the community, with many synergisti ... Full text Cite

Dynamic Opposition of Histone Modifications.

Journal Article ACS chemical biology · April 2023 Gene transcription does not only require writers of active histone modifications; on-site opposition by erasers is essential for many genes. Here, we propose the concept of dynamic opposition of histone modifications to explain this conundrum. We highlight ... Full text Cite

Proximity labeling of endogenous protein interactions enabled by directed evolution.

Journal Article Trends in biotechnology · March 2023 Enhanced ascorbate peroxidase 2 (APEX2) is a protein generated with directed evolution by Lam et al. that has transformed our understanding of subcellular entities and phenomena. The rapid kinetics of this engineered protein highlights the power of directe ... Full text Cite

RNA-responsive elements for eukaryotic translational control.

Journal Article Nature biotechnology · April 2022 The ability to control translation of endogenous or exogenous RNAs in eukaryotic cells would facilitate a variety of biotechnological applications. Current strategies are limited by low fold changes in transgene output and the size of trigger RNAs (trRNAs) ... Full text Cite

Systematic molecular evolution enables robust biomolecule discovery.

Journal Article Nature methods · January 2022 Evolution occurs when selective pressures from the environment shape inherited variation over time. Within the laboratory, evolution is commonly used to engineer proteins and RNA, but experimental constraints have limited the ability to reproducibly and re ... Full text Cite

Enabling high-throughput biology with flexible open-source automation.

Journal Article Molecular systems biology · March 2021 Our understanding of complex living systems is limited by our capacity to perform experiments in high throughput. While robotic systems have automated many traditional hand-pipetting protocols, software limitations have precluded more advanced maneuvers re ... Full text Cite

Chemical Inhibitors of a Selective SWI/SNF Function Synergize with ATR Inhibition in Cancer Cell Killing.

Journal Article ACS chemical biology · June 2020 SWI/SNF (BAF) complexes are a diverse family of ATP-dependent chromatin remodelers produced by combinatorial assembly that are mutated in and thought to contribute to 20% of human cancers and a large number of neurologic diseases. The gene-activating funct ... Full text Cite

A Deep Learning Approach to Antibiotic Discovery.

Journal Article Cell · February 2020 Due to the rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, there is a growing need to discover new antibiotics. To address this challenge, we trained a deep neural network capable of predicting molecules with antibacterial activity. We performed predicti ... Full text Cite

Nucleosome Turnover Regulates Histone Methylation Patterns over the Genome.

Journal Article Molecular cell · January 2019 Recent studies have indicated that nucleosome turnover is rapid, occurring several times per cell cycle. To access the effect of nucleosome turnover on the epigenetic landscape, we investigated H3K79 methylation, which is produced by a single methyltransfe ... Full text Cite

Chemically induced proximity in biology and medicine.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · March 2018 Proximity, or the physical closeness of molecules, is a pervasive regulatory mechanism in biology. For example, most posttranslational modifications such as phosphorylation, methylation, and acetylation promote proximity of molecules to play deterministic ... Full text Cite

Rapid and reversible epigenome editing by endogenous chromatin regulators.

Journal Article Nature communications · September 2017 Understanding the causal link between epigenetic marks and gene regulation remains a central question in chromatin biology. To edit the epigenome we developed the FIRE-Cas9 system for rapid and reversible recruitment of endogenous chromatin regulators to s ... Full text Cite

Dynamics of BAF-Polycomb complex opposition on heterochromatin in normal and oncogenic states.

Journal Article Nature genetics · February 2017 The opposition between Polycomb repressive complexes (PRCs) and BAF (mSWI/SNF) complexes has a critical role in both development and disease. Mutations in the genes encoding BAF subunits contribute to more than 20% of human malignancies, yet the underlying ... Full text Cite

Structure-guided DOT1L probe optimization by label-free ligand displacement.

Journal Article ACS chemical biology · March 2015 The DOT1L lysine methyltransferase has emerged as a validated therapeutic target in MLL-rearranged (MLLr) acute leukemias. Although S-adenosylmethionine competitive inhibitors have demonstrated pharmacological proof-of-principle in MLLr-leukemia, these com ... Full text Cite

p38 signaling and receptor recycling events in a microfluidic endothelial cell adhesion assay.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2013 Adhesion-based microfluidic cell separation has proven to be very useful in applications ranging from cancer diagnostics to tissue engineering. This process involves functionalizing microchannel surfaces with a capture molecule. High specificity and purity ... Full text Cite

Separation of two phenotypically similar cell types via a single common marker in microfluidic channels.

Journal Article Lab on a chip · September 2012 To isolate clinically and biologically relevant cell types from a heterogeneous population, fluorescent or magnetic tagging together with knowledge of surface biomarker profiles represents the state of the art. To date, it remains exceedingly difficult to ... Full text Cite

Catalytic site remodelling of the DOT1L methyltransferase by selective inhibitors.

Journal Article Nature communications · January 2012 Selective inhibition of protein methyltransferases is a promising new approach to drug discovery. An attractive strategy towards this goal is the development of compounds that selectively inhibit binding of the cofactor, S-adenosylmethionine, within specif ... Full text Cite