Affiliations

Current affiliations

• Position

  PhD student

  Company

  Boston University

  Further information

Interests

I am always excited about new stuff. That is part of the reason why I chose biology as my undergraduate major. Simply because there are so many virgin lands in biology compared to other disciplines.
And doing something related to disease is always favorable, for so many reasons, plenty of funding resources in academia, more job opportunities in industry; last but not least you can learn the disease from the patients. Since there are a lot of smart people out there, most of the diseases left unsolved nowadays are fairly complexes ones like cancer, diabetes and neurodegenetive diseases, which develop usually in decades, long enough to evade tracing the origin.
And now we really only see a tip of those icebergs, so what all I am trying is to see them better.

Projects

Our lab conducts diabetes research for years. We focus on the insulin resistance and glucose transporter trafficking in adipocytes. The glucose transporters (Glut4) are sequestered in small intracellular vesicles (GSV, <100 nm in diameter) in muscle or adipose tissue. Upon insulin treatment, Glut4 will translocate to the plasma membrane, thus allow more glucose enter the cells. While in diabetes patients this process (insulin regulated glut4 translocation to the plasma membrane) is blocked.
However the mechanism of insulin resistance is not clear till now. To study this problem, we pick up the approach by dissecting the transportation machinery involved in glut4 trafficking, and our target is GSV per se, therefore one of the very important questions is the biogenesis of these vesicles.
Sortilin is one of the several proteins found in the GSV. Previous works in our lab show that sortilin is a key protein involved in the biogenesis of GSV, and my project is to further study the mechanism of GSV biogenesis centered on sortilin.