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 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”
Saturday, November 17, 2018
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.
Saturday, November 17, 2018
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.
Genome-editing
- Niewoehner O, Garcia-Doval C, Rostøl JT, Berk C, Schwede F, Bigler L, Hall J, Marraffini LA, Jinek M. Type III CRISPR-Cas systems produce cyclic oligoadenylate second messengers. Nature. 2017 Aug 31;548(7669):543-548. doi:10.1038/nature23467. Epub 2017 Jul 19. PubMed PMID: 28722012.
- Johnson K, Bailey S. Microbiology: The case of the mysterious messenger. Nature. 2017 Aug 31;548(7669):527-528. doi: 10.1038/nature23532. Epub 2017 Aug 2. PubMed PMID: 28783729.
- Jain A, Zode G, Kasetti RB, Ran FA, Yan W, Sharma TP, Bugge K, Searby CC, Fingert JH, Zhang F, Clark AF, Sheffield VC. CRISPR-Cas9-based treatment of myocilin-associated glaucoma. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Oct 17;114(42):11199-11204. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1706193114. Epub 2017 Oct 2. PubMed PMID: 28973933; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5651749.
Molecular biology
- García-López V, Chen F, Nilewski LG, Duret G, Aliyan A, Kolomeisky AB, Robinson JT, Wang G, Pal R, Tour JM. Molecular machines open cell membranes. Nature. 2017 Aug 30;548(7669):567-572. doi: 10.1038/nature23657. PubMed PMID: 28858304.
Development
- Liang J, Balachandra S, Ngo S, O’Brien LE. Feedback regulation of steady-state epithelial turnover and organ size. Nature. 2017 Aug 31;548(7669):588-591. doi: 10.1038/nature23678. Epub 2017 Aug 23. PubMed PMID: 28847000.
- Fernandes VM, Chen Z, Rossi AM, Zipfel J, Desplan C. Glia relay differentiation cues to coordinate neuronal development in Drosophila. Science. 2017 Sep 1;357(6354):886-891. doi: 10.1126/science.aan3174. PubMed PMID: 28860380.
- Boudreau-Pinsonneault C, Cayouette M. Cell lineage tracing in the retina: Could material transfer distort conclusions? Dev Dyn. 2018 Jan;247(1):10-17. doi: 10.1002/dvdy.24535. Epub 2017 Jul 13. PubMed PMID: 28643368.
Stem cells
- Kikuchi T, Morizane A, Doi D, Magotani H, Onoe H, Hayashi T, Mizuma H, Takara S, Takahashi R, Inoue H, Morita S, Yamamoto M, Okita K, Nakagawa M, Parmar M, Takahashi J. Human iPS cell-derived dopaminergic neurons function in a primate Parkinson’s disease model. Nature. 2017 Aug 30;548(7669):592-596. doi: 10.1038/nature23664. PubMed PMID: 28858313.
- Hirota T, Ohta H, Powell BE, Mahadevaiah SK, Ojarikre OA, Saitou M, Turner JMA. Fertile offspring from sterile sex chromosome trisomic mice. Science. 2017 Sep 1;357(6354):932-935. doi: 10.1126/science.aam9046. Epub 2017 Aug 17. PubMed PMID: 28818972; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5581950.
- Blanchard JW, Xie J, El-Mecharrafie N, Gross S, Lee S, Lerner RA, Baldwin KK. Replacing reprogramming factors with antibodies selected from combinatorial antibody libraries. Nat Biotechnol. 2017 Oct;35(10):960-968. doi: 10.1038/nbt.3963. Epub 2017 Sep 11. PubMed PMID: 28892074.
Eye diseases
- Thorn RJ, Clift DE, Ojo O, Colwill RM, Creton R. The loss and recovery of vertebrate vision examined in microplates. PLoS One. 2017 Aug 17;12(8):e0183414. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183414. eCollection 2017. PubMed PMID: 28817700; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5560659.
- Jain A, Zode G, Kasetti RB, Ran FA, Yan W, Sharma TP, Bugge K, Searby CC, Fingert JH, Zhang F, Clark AF, Sheffield VC. CRISPR-Cas9-based treatment of myocilin-associated glaucoma. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Oct 17;114(42):11199-11204. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1706193114. Epub 2017 Oct 2. PubMed PMID: 28973933; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5651749.
Vision
- Stowers JR, Hofbauer M, Bastien R, Griessner J, Higgins P, Farooqui S, Fischer RM, Nowikovsky K, Haubensak W, Couzin ID, Tessmar-Raible K, Straw AD. Virtual reality for freely moving animals. Nat Methods. 2017 Aug 21. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.4399. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 28825703.
Education
- Silva HM. Intelligent design endangers education. Science. 2017 Sep 1;357(6354):880. doi: 10.1126/science.aao3245. PubMed PMID: 28860376.
Science Career
My second life as a teacher