A fun comic about everyday happenings in the Leung lab.
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In January, I visited the Center for Human Molecular Biology & Genetics at the Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, Chengdu, China [Chinese website of the Institute]. It is a large provincial hospital in Sichuan Province with a population of 80.8 million. The hospital served approximately 3.6 million outpatient and emergency cases, and carried out almost 75,000 surgeries in 2011. With this number of patients, the Center for Human Molecular Biology & Genetics collected extensive human samples and has been a leader in genetics study in China.
Prof. Zhengli Yang, the vice president of the hospital and the director of Center for Human Molecular Biology & Genetics, invited both me and a renowned eye geneticist Prof. Shomi Bhattacharya to discuss our current research on eye disease therapy. I discussed how my lab is setting up the foundation to use zebrafish to screen eye drugs at Purdue. Prof. Bhattacharya discussed his work on gene therapy and stem cell therapy. It was a great experience to interact with a world leader in genetics whom discovered many of the key genes in retinal degeneration, and a top notch research institution in China.

Yuk Fai Leung lectured at the Center for Human Molecular Biology & Genetics, the Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, Chengdu, China

Prof. Shomi Bhattacharya lectured at the Center for Human Molecular Biology & Genetics, the Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, Chengdu, China. Prof. Zhenglin Yang (right) hosted the symposium.
The members of the Leung Lab gathered to celebrate the Christmas and New Year holidays on 12/6/2013. Here are some pictures (Courtesy of Lue Xiang).
you may get a pleasant surprise when you come back!
It looks like that a Christmas/New Year ritual has been established in the lab….
Stem cells
A young scientist in Japan has found a simple approach to make totipotent stem cells by lowering the pH.
Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency. Nature
Bidirectional developmental potential in reprogrammed cells with acquired pluripotency. Nature
Retina
Genome-editing
Neuroscience
Gene therapy
We have been hoping to set up the zebrafish electroretinography in the lab to facilitate our drug discovery program for a while. When Prof. Kwoon Wong from the Kellogg Eye Center at the University of Michigan visited our department in early December, we seized the opportunity to learn from him and asked for his help to put the components together.
Dr. Don Ready kindly let us used his fly ERG setup for our test. Dr. Wong spent an afternoon trying different parameters and finally we have obtained a very decent ERG trace. Many more friends and colleagues contributed to this endeavour, including Dr. Woody Walls who gathered a number of components and laid down the foundation over a period of time, lab members Prahatha Venkatraman and Lue Xiang who collected ample healthy embryos for the test, and Lue Xiang as the assistant of Dr. Wong during the course of experimentation. We would like to optimize this system further and are seeking highly motivated students with physiology and/or engineering background. We are particularly interested in the talents who like electrophysiology and would like to contribute their effort to identify new drugs for patients.

Left: Dr. Wong explained various ERG concepts to the lab members. Top right: lab members shared their research with Dr. Wong over lunch. Middle right: Dr. Wong worked on the ERG setup. Bottom right: Dr. Wong and Fai learned from Dr. Ready on several critical components of the ERG setup. Image courtesy: Lue Xiang @ Leung lab

Dr. Woody Walls instructed us on using LabChart for data collection. Image courtesy: Lue Xiang @ Leung lab
Neuroscience
Genetics
Imaging
Genome editing
Gene regulatory network
Genomics/Systems biology
Zebrafish
Evolution
Development
Retina
Funding
Medicine
Biochemistry
Genomics
Evolution
HIV/AIDS
Genetics/Genomics
Behaviour
Disease
Vision
Stem cells
Medicine
Development
Genetics