The Baskin Lab | Weill Institute for Cell & Molecular Biology

Welcome to the Baskin Lab!

We are an interdisciplinary chemical biology and cell biology laboratory in the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell & Molecular Biology focused on understanding how lipids control cellular signaling events. We harness synthetic chemistry and protein engineering to develop tools for visualizing and manipulating lipid signaling and membrane dynamics with spatiotemporal precision. We apply these tools to reveal mechanisms underlying how lipids affect cell physiology and how aberrant lipid signaling leads to defects in development and cancer. For more information, please see our Research page or click on one of the topics below.

Click below for videos showing (1) a lab overview/virtual tour and (2) a description of our work supported by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation:

SAVEMONEY: A Free Algorithm for Cost-Effective Whole-Plasmid Sequencing

Do you want to save 80% or more on your whole-plasmid sequencing costs?

We have developed a free algorithm called SAVEMONEY (“Simple Algorithm for Very Efficient Multiplexing of Oxford Nanopore Experiments for You”) that guides researchers to mix multiple plasmids in a single tube for submission to a commercial whole-plasmid sequencing service (e.g., Plasmidsaurus, Eurofins, etc.) and then subsequently computationally de-mixes the resultant raw sequencing results to provide the sequences. We routinely mix up to six plasmids (that can differ by as little as only a few bases) in a single tube!

To try it out for yourself, go to the SAVEMONEY Google Colab page, which guides you through the entire process. For more background information on SAVEMONEY, check out Masaaki’s publication in eLife.

Latest News

Nov 14, 2024: Congratulations to our newest PhD (#9 for the lab), Dr. Din-Chi (Dylan) Chiu, for passing his B exam today!
Aug 29, 2024: Check out Xiaofu’s paper on a phosphorylation-controlled system for conditional protein recruitment (MARS), published today in Nat Cell Biol! Congrats to Xiaofu as well as Shiying, Yuan-Ting, Dylan, and collaborators in the Smolka and McIntire labs!
Aug 23, 2024: We wish a fond farewell to visiting student Shradda Vadodaria. Best wishes on the rest of your PhD at Imperial College in the Tate lab!
Aug 22, 2024: Congratulations to lab alum Reika on winning an ACS Division of Biological Chemistry Young Investigator Award and delivering a fantastic award lecture at the ACS National Meeting in Denver!
July 18, 2024: Check out our latest paper, by Lin, Harry, Dylan, and Reika, on using IMPACT to image inter-organelle lipid transport from the plasma membrane to the endoplasmic reticulum, in ACS Chem Biol!
June 11, 2024: Congratulations to Hongyan, Adnan, and Dylan for having their paper on Kramer as a regulator of Wnt signaling and stem cell proliferation in the Drosophila midgut published in iScience!
June 4, 2024: Welcome to Shradda Vadodaria, a PhD student from Imperial College London in Ed Tate’s lab, who is visiting our lab for a summer internship!
May 27, 2024: Interested in superresolution imaging of lipids? Check out Brittany’s methods article on Lipid Expansion Microscopy in Current Protocols!
May 19, 2024: Congratulations to Vashtí, undergraduate superstar and McNair Scholar, on her graduation!
May 14, 2024: Congratulations to Shiying, whose collaborative paper with Laura Quirion and JF Côté from IRCM/Université de Montréal on ARF family interactomes is now published in J Cell Sci!
Apr 19, 2024: Welcome to our newest lab member, Beth Ryan from the Chemistry & Chemical Biology graduate field!
Mar 13, 2024: Check out the First Reactions about Julia’s LOVPLD paper in ACS Cent Sci!
Mar. 6, 2024: Check out the research highlight of Julia’s LOVPLD paper in Nat Chem Biol!
Jan. 30, 2024: Congratulations to Julia, Masaaki, and Reika for having their LOVPLD membrane editor paper published in ACS Cent Sci!
Jan. 2, 2024: Our collaborative paper with Hening Lin’s lab on ER-mitochondria membrane contact sites is published in Mol Cell Proteomics!
Dec 20, 2023: We wish a fond farewell to undergraduate researcher Morrow Zhang. Best wishes on your next endeavors!
Dec 19, 2023: Happy Holidays!
Dec 14, 2023: Congratulations to Julia and Lin for winning 1st prize in the “Science” and “Around Cornell” categories for the 2023 Weill Institute Photo Contest!
Dec 5, 2023: Congratulations to Yuan-Ting for passing her A exam!
Nov 8, 2023: Congratulations to Nathan for passing his A exam!
Oct 25, 2023: We welcome Richard Yuding Huang and Aditya Bhattacharyya, two first-year graduate students from Chemistry & Chemical Biology who have joined the lab!
Sept 28, 2023: Check out these pieces on the Addgene Blog and in Nature Catalysis highlighting Reika’s recent superPLD paper!
Aug 31, 2023: Congratulations to Julia on her story on LOVPLD as an ultralow background membrane editor, with key contributions from Reika and Masaaki as well, published as a preprint on bioRxiv!
Aug 21, 2023: Congratulations to Masaaki for having his review on Chemical Approaches for Measuring and Manipulating Lipids at the Organelle Level published in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives!
Aug 16, 2023: Congratulations to Reika for having her collaborative paper on phosphatidic acid and mitochondria published in J Cell Biol!
Aug 14, 2023: Congratulations to Masaaki for having the latest version of his SAVEMONEY manuscript published in eLife!
July 14, 2023: Our last departure of the summer — with heavy hearts we wish goodbye to Dr. Xiaofu Cao, PhD #8 from the lab, who will be starting a position as Scientist at Voyager Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. Bon voyage, Xiaofu!
July 7, 2023: The departures continue — today we wish a fond farewell to postdoctoral scholar Hongyan Sun, who will be starting a research position at Louisiana State University. Goodbye and good luck, Hongyan!
June 30, 2023: We wish a fond farewell to our lab’s first postdoctoral scholar, Brittany White-Mathieu, who will be starting a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Hampshire in Fall 2023. Goodbye and good luck, Brittany!
June 26, 2023: Congratulations to Julia for passing her A exam!
June 23, 2023: Welcome to Omolara Atoyebi, our newest undergraduate researcher, from the CHAMPS program!
May 22, 2023: Congratulations to Reika, whose paper on directed evolution of a membrane editor is published in Nature Chemistry! Free link: https://rdcu.be/dcIEc.
May 19, 2023: Huge congratulations to Brittany, who has accepted an Assistant Professor position at in the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, where the White-Mathieu lab will open its doors in Fall 2023!
Apr 17, 2023: Want to sequence whole plasmids for much less money? Read Masaaki’s preprint describing SAVEMONEY, an algorithm that permits multiplexing for Oxford Nanopore long-read plasmid sequencing and try it out for yourself at our Goo gle Colab page!

For a complete archive of lab news and information about our group meetings, please see the News & Events page.

Our research is made possible by generous support from these funding sources: