Research
Before becoming a full-time writer, I spent about eight years working in research labs. My early work was in molecular biology, where I helped develop transgenic mouse lines at the University of Iowa to study the role of impaired insulin signaling on the heart.
Later, I pivoted into synthetic biology. At Imperial College London, where I was a Fulbright Scholar, I worked with Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro and Tom Ellis, building tools for multiplexed CRISPR in yeast. I also developed some early technologies for assembling large, highly repetitive gRNA arrays and inducible CRISPR systems for gene activation/interference. I also spent time at Caltech in Rob Phillips' lab, working on quantitative biophysics. My work aimed to map how mutations in bacterial operators change gene expression, one promoter at a time.
The list below is mirrored from my Google Scholar profile.
Publications
- 2022 Insulin and Insulin-Like Growth Factor 1 Signaling Preserves Sarcomere Integrity in the Adult Heart — Riehle, Weatherford, McCarty, et al. Molecular and Cellular Biology.
- 2022 Inducible expression of large gRNA arrays for multiplexed CRISPRai applications — Shaw, Studený, Roy, Hapeta, McCarty, et al. Nature Communications.
- 2020 Multiplexed CRISPR technologies for gene editing and transcriptional regulation — McCarty, Graham, Studený, Ledesma-Amaro. Nature Communications.
- 2020 Deciphering the regulatory genome of Escherichia coli, one hundred promoters at a time — Ireland, Beeler, Flores-Bautista, McCarty, et al. eLife.
- 2020 Insulin receptor substrates differentially exacerbate insulin-mediated left ventricular remodeling — Riehle, Weatherford, Wende, Jaishy, Seei, McCarty, et al. JCI Insight.
- 2020 Genetic Barcodes Enable Quantitative Mapping of Operator Mutants to Gene Expression — McCarty, Razo-Mejia, Phillips. Biophysical Journal.
- 2019 Synthetic Biology Tools to Engineer Microbial Communities for Biotechnology — McCarty, Ledesma-Amaro. Trends in Biotechnology.
- 2019 Rapid Assembly of gRNA Arrays via Modular Cloning in Yeast — McCarty, Shaw, Ellis, Ledesma-Amaro. ACS Synthetic Biology.
- 2017 Leukocytoclastic vasculitis associated with endocarditis in a patient with transposition of the great arteries and mechanical valve replacement — Riehle, Scharf, Sieweke, et al. Cardiovascular Pathology.