I graduated from South China Agriculture University in 2010 with a B.Sc. in Biological Science. During this time, I was able to work on a project on detection of aluminum residue in jellyfish product, which is part of the project “Industry Standard Control of Aquatic Products” at the Department of Biological Science within the university. Later that year I started the M.Med. program majored in Pathogenic Organisms at the Southern Medical University which I completed in 2013. During my master’s, I was actively involved in four different projects related to detection and characterization of infectious pathogens, (i) “A Real-time PCR detection method for Francisellatularensis with TaqMan probe”, (ii) “The function of EspF protein in E. coli”, (iii) “The molecular epidemiology of emerging and re-emerging adenovirus”, and (iv) “The investigation of attenuated bivalent vaccine for adenovirus”.
To expand my knowledge as a virologist of infectious disease, I joined the laboratory of Kwok- Yung Yuen at the University of Hong Kong to pursue a PhD degree. During my PhD study, I was focused on the novel and emerging infectious viruses, microbial discovery and bioinformatics of pathogens epidemiology and evolution. I worked on three projects relevant to zoological viruses and infectious diseases, (i) I independently completed a five-year cohort project of characterization of genetic evolution of circulating picornaviruses from 2008 to 2018. I summarized and characterized the prevalence and epidemiology of diverse emerging/potentially emerging circulating picornaviruses, identified the predominant species and the recombination events which are related to more severe diseases, measured the efficacy of commercial intravenous immunoglobulin on the novel/emerging/re-emerging virus strains, and deciphered the mechanism of virus genetic evolution by using bioinformatic tools; (ii) I detected and isolated the novel/emerging zoological viruses (such as parvovirus, paramyxovirus, picornavirus and coronavirus) from wild and domestic animal samples, such as bat, rodent, birds, feline, canine, swine, dolphin, and alpaca. To further analyze the novel/emerging virus, I sequenced and annotated the whole genome of selected virus strains and performed the evolutionary and phylogenetical analysis on them using bioinformatic tools; (iii) Based on the findings of the novel/emerging zoological viruses, I developed a rapid on-site detection kit for COVID-19 (onestep colorimetric reverse-transcriptional loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay (COVID- 19-LAMP).
Currently, I am working as a postdoctoral research fellow in Athe M.N. Tsibris’s laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. I have worked to investigate the mechanisms of HIV latency and reactivation combined with single cell sequencing tools, which is necessary to understand how HIV rebounds after ART treatment cessation, and surely, will provide a comprehensive data library for HIV drug and LRA screening. My work involves the measurement and characterization of genetic and proteomic changes in HIV infection model by using cutting edge single cell sequencing techniques (such as scRNA sequencing) and computational analysis platforms (such as R and Python).
Research Interest
My research interest is to develop a latency model for HIV and decipher the genetic and proteomic heterogeneity of HIV latency and reversal using the cutting-edge single cell sequencing techniques. A well-known strategy to cure AIDS is the “kick and kill” theory, which uses drugs to reactivate latent HIV and eradicate infected cells by the host immunity. Although the anti-retroviral therapy (ART) has been proven effective in significantly delaying disease development, prolonging the life span, and improving the outcomes of patients, the extremely rare and long-lived reservoirs of HIV (provirus) are undistinguishable and persisting in ART-suppressed patients and will rebound rapidly after treatment cessation. HIV-1 proviruses from reservoir cells are transcriptionally or translationally inactivated or occluded to be recognized and purged by the immune system, which mainly preclude of the cure of ART-suppressed individuals. Due to the extremely low frequency of persisting latently infected cells in patients, primary cells from HIV individuals are difficult to sample and limiting the research of HIV latency. Many in vitro and ex vivo models have been developed to investigate HIV infection and latency, a comprehensive model is required to overcome the limitations of currents models, for example, limited response to latency reversal agents (LRA) stimulation. The rapid progress of high-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing techniques are widely used in cancer investigations. HIV models in cooperated with the single cell techniques provide a new path to quantify and identify the changes of the genetic, proteomic, and cellular levels in HIV models. Furthermore, the combinations of different single cell techniques in conjunction with integrative computational data analysis will provided a more comprehensive way to understand the HIV infection, latency, and reactivation, and eventually, to develop an efficient HIV therapy.