Speaker: Zhang Zhao, Assistant Professor, Center for the Genetics of Host Defense, Division of Endocrinology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Time: 10:00-11:30 a.m., July 16, 2024, GMT+8

Venue: B101, Lui Che-woo Building, PKU

Abstract: 

Many breakthroughs in understanding metabolic diseases were achieved with mouse mutants. However, the inherently low rate of spontaneous mutations and labor-intensive positional cloning techniques once limited the speed of new discoveries. To identify new genes of which mutations cause metabolic diseases, we induce random mutations by chemical mutagenesis and screen mutant mice for abnormalities in body weight, glucose/insulin, and liver triglycerides, and couple screening to an automated meiotic mapping platform which lets us determine the cause of phenotypes in real time. Our metabolic screens reveal many phenotypes that sometimes present surprising exceptions to conventional concepts of pathogenesis. These exceptions help us to understand how dysregulation of food intake and energy expenditure cause obesity and how fatty liver disease develops in non-obese individuals.

Source: School of Life Sciences, PKU