Tess Branon
Principal Scientist, Microchemistry, Proteomics and Lipidomics (MPL), Research Biology
"If the cell is a city, the proteins are its citizens. My lab develops platforms for proteins to tell us all about their lives – who they are, where they live and work, who they like to spend time with – so we can better understand the inner workings of their communities and how dysfunction in those communities gives rise to disease."
I began my graduate career working with Alice Ting at MIT where I used directed evolution to engineer new proximity labeling technologies, namely TurboID, for proteomic mapping in living cells and organisms. Half way though my graduate studies, we left the Boston cold and moved to California to join Stanford University where I was able to form several collaborations to apply my newly developed technologies to a wide variety of biological questions and model systems. I then went on to the University of California, Berkeley for my post-doc with Gregory Barton, where I explored a long-held interest in the microbiome and its effect on host biology and disease. After my post-doc, I made the leap from academia to Industry and worked at Interline Therapeutics with Don Kirkpatrick where I learned how to fully leverage mass spectrometry-based proteomics for drug discovery. Joining Genentech, I am excited to have the opportunity to continue and build upon this work.
Featured Publication
Efficient proximity labeling in living cells and organisms with TurboID.
Nat Biotechnol . 2020 Jan;38(1):108. doi: 10.1038/s41587-019-0355-0.