Daniel A. Fletcher

About

Daniel A. Fletcher is the Principal Investigator and Department Chair holding the Purnendu Chatterjee Chair in Engineering Biological Systems in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He is also a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Fletcher Lab at UC Berkeley is a multi-disciplinary group of researchers who value creativity, diversity, and an adventurous approach to science. The lab embraces individuals with different scientific and personal experiences and aims to create an environment where everyone is supported to learn and explore, challenged to push the frontiers of knowledge, and launched into the next step of their career. The lab culture emphasizes teamwork and fun along the way.

Research topics

• Biology
• Biochemistry
• Chemistry
• Cell biology
• Biophysics
• Virology
• Molecular biology
• Medicine
• Computational biology
• Physics

Selected publications

• Amplification-free detection of SARS-CoV-2 with CRISPR-Cas13a and mobile phone microscopy

  Cell · 2020 · 1000 citations

  DOI

• Rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in saliva via Cas13

  Nature Biomedical Engineering · 2022 · 134 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Weak Link with Actin Organizes Tight Junctions to Control Epithelial Permeability

  Developmental Cell · 2020 · 95 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Biased localization of actin binding proteins by actin filament conformation

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 45 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The assembly of actin filaments into distinct cytoskeletal structures plays a critical role in cell physiology, but how proteins localize differentially to these structures within a shared cytoplasm remains unclear. Here, we show that the actin-binding domains of accessory proteins can be sensitive to filament conformational changes. Using a combination of live cell imaging and in vitro single molecule binding measurements, we show that tandem calponin homology domains (CH1-CH2) can be mutated t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cell surface crowding is a tunable energetic barrier to cell-cell fusion

  Nature Communications · 2025-08-04 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Cell-cell fusion is fundamental to processes such as muscle formation and viral infection. An essential step in fusion is close membrane apposition, but cell membranes are crowded with proteins, glycoproteins, and glycolipids, which must be cleared before a fusion pore can be nucleated. Here, we find that cell surface crowding reduces fusogenicity independent of how fusion is driven. We estimate that crowding presents an energetic barrier to membrane apposition on the scale of ~ $${100k…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01GM074751

  NIH · $2.4M · 2016

• Mechanical regulation of actin binding proteins

  NIH · $1.5M · 2019–2024

• NIH Grant R01GM072736

  NIH · $1.2M · 2011

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer A. Doudna

  University of California, Berkeley

  118 shared

• Sungmin Son

  University of California, Berkeley

  110 shared

• Gavin J. Knott

  Monash University

  77 shared

• Ka Man Carmen Chan

  City University of Hong Kong

  69 shared

• Eva M. Schmid

  University of California, Berkeley

  65 shared

• Tai‐De Li

  65 shared

• Andrew R. Harris

  Carleton University

  62 shared

• Peter Bieling

  Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology

  54 shared

Labs

• Fletcher LabPI

  The Fletcher Lab is made up of a talented, interactive, and multi-disciplinary group of researchers who value creativity, diversity, and an adventurous approach to science.

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Biochemistry

  Stanford University Medical Center

• PhD, Mechanical Engineering

  Stanford University

• B.S., Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

  Princeton University

• D.Phil., Engineering Science

  University of Oxford

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Carlos Bustamanteh-164
• Eric Betzigh-116
• David G. Drubinh-103