NEWS

e-Newsletter Volume 6 Issue 1 | January & February 2026 Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs As the year 2026 started, the university saw many changes. We have a new staffing structure that we are adjusting to. I want to express my gratitude to our hard-working staff who often do their new job in addition to their previous job. Thank you so much! I am very optimistic about our new leadership, both at the college and the university. Dean Bullock and President Kim are fantastic ch

CBB PhD student Rachel Yuqiu Wang (left) from Dr. Fengzhu Sun’s (right) group published a paper, “Benchmarking alignment strategies for Hi-C reads in metagenomic Hi-C data” in Genome Biology . The study identified the best tools for aligning metagenomic HiC reads to contigs in metagenomic HiC studies. Former alumni Dr. Yuxuan Du (bottom) and Dr. Fengzhu Sun co-supervised the project. Please read the paper here .

Dr. James Bullock, the new Dean of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, gave a fascinating guest lecture on non-linear cosmological simulations in Drs. Peter Calabrese's and Remo Rohs' class, QBIO 105 Introduction to Quantitative Biology Seminar.

Second-year CBB PhD student Wei Yu Tang published his second paper with USC affiliation. Wei Yu's new paper is from his undergraduate research on RNA design and appeared in Nature Communications with him as sole first author. The work introduces a new method for finding nucleotide sequences that fold into a target secondary structure. Please read the paper here .

CBB PhD student Yingtong Liu (left) from Dr. Adam Maclean's (right) group developed a new method, iterative logistic regression (iRL) to identify subtle effects in single-cell gene expression datasets. In collaboration with Dr. Evanthia Roussos Torres (bottom) at the USC Norris Cancer Center, this led to the discovery of myeloid cell differentiation pathways that were perturbed by the treatment of breast cancers with a promising new combination immunotherapy. Please read the

Per the invitation of the editor of Current Protocols, Dr. Fengzhu Sun and collaborators published a tutorial, “A Beginner's Guide to Using DeepVirFinder for Viral Sequence Identification From Metagenomic Datasets”. DeepVirFinder is a widely used and cited software package for the identification of viruses from microbial communities. Please find the paper here .

QCB joint faculty Dr. Steve Gazal published a paper, “Evaluating genetic ancestry inference from single-cell transcriptomic datasets” in HGG Advances . Please read the paper here .

QCB faculty Dr. Steve Kay and collaborators published a paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation . The study identifies a novel mechanism by which glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs), which drive tumor growth and therapy resistance, evade a form of programmed cell death called cuproptosis. Disrupting the clock machinery or fatty acid desaturation sensitized GSCs to cuproptosis suggests new therapeutic avenues for targeting resistant glioblastoma cells. Please read the paper

QCB research scientist Dr. Anastasiia Sadybekov (left) and research associate Dr. Antonina Nazarova (right) from Dr. Seva Katritch’s (bottom) lab published a paper “Development of potent, selective cPLA2 inhibitors for targeting neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders” in NPJ Drug Discovery . The study employed the updated version of the synthon-based screening tool, V-SYNTHES2 to predict cPLA2 inhibitors from 36 billion size chemical sp

QCB faculty Dr. Geoffrey Fudenberg received funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as one of several co-PIs at USC. The grant supports Dr. Maxime Tortora, a postdoc in the Fudenberg lab, and the lab's research into genome organization.

Drs. Brendon Cooper (top left), Tsu-Pei Chiu (top right), and Raktim Mitra (bottom left) from the Rohs Lab (bottom right) published a collaborative paper in Science Advances that uses quantitative imaging of fly wings to study the relationship between phenotype, spatial expression levels, and transcription factor binding. The work provides new mechanistic insights in enhancer function. Please read the paper here .

QCB joint faculty Nobel Laureate Dr. Arieh Warshel published a study, “Exploring evolutionary trajectories of drug resistance” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The study (read here ) was also featured in USC News here .