Technology and methods

A new screening method in the parasite Toxoplasma gondii allows researchers to look beyond whether or not a gene is essential to survival and track the gene’s product through time and physical space 

Researchers in Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab tackled the problem of how to make mature liver from stem cells in the lab, and found that thyroid hormone signaling plays a key role.

Whitehead Institute scientists taking on a research challenge outside of their area of expertise use an open science approach to get outside input.

New research from Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman and collaborators enables researchers to predict a cell’s path over time, such as what type of cell it will become, in normal settings or under genetic perturbations.

Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring created a new way to study a family of enzymes that control gene expression in plants. Their method reveals how these enzymes affect key decisions in plant development, including when to produce flowers.

Where there's a will, there might need to be a new scientific way. 

Researchers at Whitehead Institute are finding new ways to listen to the language of living organisms.  

Scientists turned cutting-edge CRISPR and single-cell sequencing tools on human cytomegalovirus, which affects around half of all adults, illuminating interactions between viral and host genes and adding to the list of possible drug targets. 

With advances to experimental tools in science, researchers can collect massive amounts of data, on a scale beyond what previous generations could have imagined. But then a new challenge arises: how do they make sense of it? 

Whitehead Institute researchers have designed methods to make lab research flow more smoothly.