IWR News New IWR Member: Dr. Alexander Sasse

I am a Junior Group Leader at the newly established Center for Synthetic Genomics (SynGen), hosted at the Center for Molecular Biology Heidelberg (ZMBH) at Heidelberg University. My group develops deep learning-based sequence-to-function (S2F) models to investigate how genetic variants influence cellular phenotypes. Our goal is to gain a deeper mechanistic understanding of heritable diseases and enable the synthetic design of regulatory sequences. We build models that link regulatory genomic sequences to gene expression outputs by integrating multi-modal data from diverse experimental assays. 

These models learn the gene regulatory code of our cells and can be used to identify functional cis-regulatory elements and predict the effects of genetic variants. Such tools are crucial for uncovering how cells orchestrate gene expression across space and time, ultimately helping us understand the causes of genetic diseases and develop new therapeutic strategies. In addition, we combine these predictive models with generative approaches to guide the design of DNA and RNA molecules with tailored cellular functions, supporting applications in gene and mRNA-based therapies.

Vita:

• 2024-now : Junior Group Leader at the Center for Synthetic Genomics - Center for Molecular Biology (ZMBH), Heidelberg University (Germany): Deep regulatory sequence-to-function models for synthetic genomics
• 2021-2024: Postdoctoral fellow at Sara Mostafavi’s lab at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington (USA): Multi-modal CNNs to characterize regulatory elements that regulate changes in gene expression
• 2016-2021: PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics, (Computational Biology track), University of Toronto (Canada): “Inference of RNA-binding protein specificities from protein sequences”, Prof. Dr. Quaid Morris
• 2012-2015: Master’s in Biophysics, Technische Universitaet Muenchen (Germany): “On the development of problem-oriented knowledge-based scoring functions for protein-protein docking”, Prof. Dr. Martin Zacharias
• 2009-2012: Bachelor’s in Physics, Justus-Liebig Universitaet Giessen (Germany): “Implementation and analysis of enzyme-modified AlGaN/GaN field effect transistors”, Prof. Dr. Martin Eickhoff