Owen Ouyang
@owenouyang.bsky.social
25 followers 200 following 17 posts
Graduate student at the University of Illinois. I like antibodies, national parks and running:) I'm also an eLife community ambassador! @elifecommunity.bsky.social
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owenouyang.bsky.social
Once again, I’m incredibly grateful for the unwavering support of my advisor, @wchnicholas.bsky.social, and the invaluable contributions of all my co-authors. Thank you for helping bring this idea to life!
owenouyang.bsky.social
With the help of Cursor Agent/Claude Sonnet 4, we created a locally run user interface for our design pipeline that enables quick and simple design of oligo pool-based native pairing antibody library assemblies. Have fun screening, it's a pool partyyy! :) github.com/nicwulab/oPo...
GitHub - nicwulab/oPool_display: Antibody library selection
Antibody library selection. Contribute to nicwulab/oPool_display development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
owenouyang.bsky.social
I'm thrilled to share that the oPool⁺ display is on the cover of this week's #ScienceTranslationalMedicine! We hope that the future use of this platform can accelerate antibody characterization, benefit therapeutic & vaccine development, and facilitate iterative refinements of antibody AI models.
science.org
Don't miss the new issue of #ScienceTranslationalMedicine!

A clinical study in Nepal shows that waning immunity to Japanese encephalitis virus can worse the severity of dengue, a new platform leapfrogs laborious obstacles in antibody discovery, and more. https://scim.ag/47qcFpw
The cover shows a library of antibody single-chain variable fragment (scFv)-mRNA-cDNA fusion molecules targeting an influenza hemagglutinin immobilized on a magnetic bead surface.
Reposted by Owen Ouyang
ecrlife.bsky.social
Academia is built on collaboration and mentorship. However, as ECRs, we tend to hesitate to reach out to our seniors. In our latest ecrLife post, @owenouyang.bsky.social encourages young scientists to give it a try, since many seniors are happy to write back and provide advice.
tinyurl.com/35u7hw5h
Reaching Out to Senior Scientists: A Step Worth Taking
When we start out as early career researchers, we often hesitate to reach out to senior scientists. However, they are often excited to help young scientists. Here, Owen Ouyang discusses how mentorship...
ecrlife.org
Reposted by Owen Ouyang
tylernstarr.bsky.social
Had a blast listening to exciting science and stories at last week's 4th annual Graduate Student Rising Stars symposium @uofubiochem.bsky.social, topped off by a keynote describing the wonders of cone snail venoms from Toto Olivera. Thanks to all of our visitors and speakers!
9 Graduate Student "Rising Stars" smiling in a group photo at the end of a successful symposium
owenouyang.bsky.social
I’m grateful for the unwavering support from my advisor @wchnicholas.bsky.social as well as everyone from the Wu Lab. It has been an amazing journey so far, and I’m excited for more to come! We envision a near future where antibody binding characterization is fast, simple, and cost-effective. (14/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
oPool+ display also holds promise for advancing toward the future synergy between machine learning models and experimental systems by enabling rapid validation of prediction results at scale. We believe it represents a starting point for the future of high-throughput antibody biology. (13/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
oPool+ display can be generalized to any antigens of interest as long as they can be recombinantly purified. More importantly, oPool+ display also offers great flexibility in experimental design, as the synthesized library can be stored, reused, and expanded at any time. (12/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
This result suggests that a diverse native pairing library of ~20,000 unique antibody sequences can be assembled in just one 96-well plate PCR reaction, followed by concurrent specificity characterization against 10-20 antigens of choice within days. Such a scale would be truly unprecedented. (11/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
In the update, we tested the limit of our assembly strategy as we increased the # of scFv to assemble in a single PCR. Our one-pot PCR strategy performed amazingly well, as it achieved extremely high reproducibility and coverage even with the assembly of different 200 scFvs in a single tube. (9/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
Through computational design, we overcame this challenge by splitting a defined scFv sequence into fragments and assembling them back through PCR. To ensure precise assembly, we utilized the highly diverse CDR regions to computationally design overlaps that are unique at the nucleotide level. (9/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
The key innovation of oPool+ display lies within the assembly of native paring antibodies, as current technologies does not permit massively parallel oligo synthesis >350nt, which is only 1/3 of the length of a single-chain variable fragment (scFv), the shortest human antibody format. (8/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
We then selected 25 antibodies and thoroughly tested their binding against all 9 HAs by both BLI (using Fab) and ELISA (using IgG). Both validations indicated >70% of true positive rate and >95% of true negative rate, demonstrating the robust performance of oPool+ display. (7/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
Our screening showed that 114 of the 325 antibodies bound to at least one of the nine HA screened, 45 of which were further identified to target the more conserved stem domain through either HA stem screens or binding competition with CR9114, a known HA stem antibody. (6/n)
owenouyang.bsky.social
As a proof-of-concept, we applied oPool+ display to rapidly synthesize >300 uncharacterized and uncommon influenza hemagglutinin (HA) antibodies and measure their binding to 9 HA variants through 16 different screens. Over 5,000 binding tests were performed in < 5 days. (5/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
To address this, we combined oligo pool synthesis with mRNA display to synthesize and screen antibodies with defined sequences at scale. Compared to the conventional approaches, our platform is significantly faster (~3-5 days), costs ~80-90% less, and only requires one person to perform it. (4/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
Considering that hundreds to thousands of natively paired antibody sequences can usually be isolated in a clinical study, this process would often take dedicated research teams weeks to months to complete and cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bottleneck clearly exists. (3/)
owenouyang.bsky.social
Antibody discovery is crucial to developing therapeutics and understanding adaptive immunity. However, despite years of research, the characterization of monoclonal antibodies today remains low throughput, as it involves cloning, expressing, and characterizing each antibody one by one (2/)
Reposted by Owen Ouyang
elifecommunity.bsky.social
1/ From Brazil to South Korea, we’re excited to welcome 107 early-career researchers who are looking to promote responsible behaviours in science to the eLife Community Ambassador programme 🎉
https://buff.ly/3EYNfmE
world map with pins showing the locations of E life ambassadors
Reposted by Owen Ouyang
drewoberst.bsky.social
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