Speaker: Gaowei Wang, Ph.D., Postdoctoral researcher in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego

Time: 13:00-14:00 pm, Februray 13, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: Zoom Meeting ID: 910 9636 7823 Password: cqbcqb
https://zoom.us/j/91096367823?pwd=M3d0bXIrOThoS2o4Y3dNV2JYVnUvUT09

Abstract:

Altered function and gene regulation in pancreatic islet beta cells is a hallmark of type 2 diabetes (T2D), but we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms that drive beta cell dysfunction. In this talk, I will introduce a strategy to identify mechanisms of beta cell dysfunction in T2D that combines experiments and computations. I will first introduce experimental data from measurements of chromatin activity, gene expression, and cell function in single beta cells.  Then, I will introduce a machine-learning pipeline, inspired by the fluctuation test established by Luria and Delbrück, that robustly identified two T2D-relevant beta cell subtypes from heterogeneous human single-cell data. Through gene regulatory network analysis, I further identified gene regulatory programs maintaining beta cell subtype identity and determining T2D-associated functional changes in both beta cell subtypes. This study demonstrates the power of combining experimental and computational tools for identifying mechanisms of complex diseases.

Biography:

Gaowei Wang is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego, where he studies mechanisms of beta cell dysfunction in type 2 diabetes. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he used methods and concepts from nonlinear dynamical systems to understand cell fate determinations.

Source: School of Life Sciences