Dr. Zhang is focused on the chemical biology of protein aggregation in stressed cells, and his laboratory is developing chemical technologies for tackling important biological questions related to protein aggregation. His research activities include developing methods for visualizing the multi-step protein aggregation process in live cells, quantifying the recovery of protein networks following cell stress, and probing and regulating the aggregation of disordered proteins in membraneless cellular subcompartments. His research has led to the development of methods that allow the community to visualize and differentiate, in live cells, the many conformations through which folding proteins pass as they form aggregates within membraneless compartments. These methods will be used in the proposed research and enable the detection of alpha-synuclein both in test tubes and in live cells.