B.S.: Tsinghua University (2017)

M.D.: Peking Union Medical College (2019)

I am a Dphil student in Clinical Neurosciences starting from 2019. I am in Professor Kevin Talbot's group, which mainly focuses on basic medical research in motor neuron diseases.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive disorder of the nervous system in which motor neurons degenerate leading to muscle weakness and death from respiratory failure with an average survival from symptom onset of 2-3 years. The molecular mechanism underlying this disabling disease is widely investigated but remains unclear, and treatment is so limited that it is often regarded as incurable. C9ORF72 is the most common genetic mutation that leads to ALS, which is proposed to affect transcription, splicing, translation and other cell processes through a variety of mechanisms.

My project aims to investigate the translatomic profile of C9ORF72/ALS with an induced pluripotent stem cell-derived motor neurons (iPSC-MN) model. Additionally, we adopt a cell-type specific approach, namely Translating Ribosome Affinity Purification (TRAP), to selectively study the actively translating mRNA in motor neurons. This study will provide some insights on exactly which genes are altered post-transcriptionally and how this mutation leads to disease.