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

Mar 24, 2025: Congratulations to Lin and Nathan on their review on emerging tools for tracking lipid dynamics being published in Annu Rev Biochem!
Mar 11, 2025: Congratulations to Jeremy for winning the ACS Chemical Biology Young Investigator Award!
Mar 10, 2025: Welcome to our two newest undergraduate researchers, Cliff Zhang and Michael Kong!
Mar 6, 2025: Congratulations to Dylan on his new ChemRxiv preprint that harnesses photoaffinity labeling to discover interactors and physiological functions of an unusual three-tailed phospholipid!
Jan 23, 2025: Congratulations to Lin and Xiaofu on their new bioRxiv preprint describing a role for the Cullin-3 adaptor SHKBP1 in preventing oligomerization of the autophagy adaptor SQSTM1/p62 and enhancing Keap1-mediated antioxidant signaling!
Jan 14, 2025: Congratulations to Brian and Julia on the publication of their magnum opus, “Synthetic Lipid Biology”, in Chem Rev!
Jan 3, 2025: We bid a fond farewell to Dylan Chiu (PhD #9) and wish him the best in his transition to an R&D position at TSMC!
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!

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: