Our lab has started to travel again after several years of hiberation due to COVID. The first trip we recent had was to attend the Heartland Vision Science Symposium at the Glick Eye Institute at Indiana University School of Medicine. We met many old and new friends. Beichen presented his current project to the audience. His talk’s title was “In vivo drug screening for night blindness using zebrafish visual behaviour”.
On 8/1/2019, Truc Kha presented her research work on retinitis pigmentosa, a form of retinal degeneration, at the SURF Research Symposium.
Truc presenting her research work on retinal degeneration.
I was invited by Prof. Chunqiao Liu to visit ZhongShan Ophthalmic Center at Sun Yat-Sen University from 2019-05-27 to 05-29.
Zhongshan Opthalmic Center. They have two beautiful buildings: one for clinical service, and another one for research.
The clinical building has more than 20 floors! The research building also has 10 floors!
What a great view at the top of the clinical building!
I had a great interaction with Prof. Liu’s group and many other professors in the institute. They are doing top-notch research work!
Profs. Chunqiao Liu and Yuk Fai Leung
I gave a seminar on our drug discovery using zebrafish to colleagues at ZhongShan Ophthalmic Center.
At Purdue, five zebrafish laboratories (Qing Deng, Daniel Suter, Yuk Fai Leung, David Umulis, Guangjun Zhang) have a joint lab meeting called FLAME (zebraFish LAb MEeting). We not only meet regularly to discuss science, but we also have fun together. On 5/13/2019, we concluded another productive year by hiking together at the Turkey Run State Park.
The FLAME group
The Flame Group
Fai leading the younger generation.
Logan climbing up the (academic) ladder.
Fai and Isaac!
Emre attended the Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference 2019 and presented a poster entitled “Investigating Inhibition of Apoptosis as a Novel Treatment for Retinitis Pigmentosa using a Transgenic Zebrafish Model”.
Emre presenting his work at the Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference.
Emre Coskun, Rebecca James, Logan Ganzen, Truc Kha and Yuk Fai Leung attended the 134th Annual Meeting for the Indiana Academy of Science in Indianapolis, IN on March 30th, 2019. All students presented at the meeting.
The Leung Lab!
Logan Ganzen, our graduate student, presented his work identifying a FDA-approved drug for treating night blindness.
Logan presenting his work.
Emre Coskun (right) presented his work on “Investigating Inhibition of Apoptosis as a Novel Treatment for Retinitis Pigmentosa using a Transgenic Zebrafish Model”.
Rebecca James presented her work on “Utilization of a Zebrafish Visual Motor Response Assay to Discover FDA Approved Drugs to Treat Retinitis Pigmentosa”
On 11/12/2018, Emre Coskun attended the Purdue Fall Undergraduate Research Exposition and presented a poster of his undergraduate reserarch work on “A Pharmacological Model of TRPA1-Mediated Nociception in the Zebrafish for Therapeutic Discovery”. This project was conceived by our graduate student Logan Ganzen. Logan and Emre worked closely to develop the foundation of this research project, and established zebrafish as a model for screening drugs to alleviate pain in patients.
Emre presenting his undergraduate research work.
On 11/10/2018, Logan Ganzen and Yuk Fai Leung attended the 2018 Sensorium at Purdue University. Logan gave a talk on “Drug Screening and Hit Identification for Retinitis Pigmentosa with Zebrafish” and shared our latest discoveries on using zebrafish to find new drugs to treat night blindness.
Logan described how we used zebrafish model of night blindness to screen and find new drugs to treat the disease.
Logan described the therapeutic effect of a positive compound that he identified in his doctoral research.
ELSI
Genome Editing
Development
Stem cells
Neuroscience
Microbiology
Evolution
Neuroscience
Genetics
Cell Biology
Signal Transduction
Genome-editing
Molecular biology
Development
Stem cells
Eye diseases
Vision
Education
Science Career