Dr. Dengke Ma from University of California, San Francisco paid a visit to IHB on June 20th, 2017. 

Dr. Dengke Ma from University of California, San Francisco paid a visit to Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of Chinese Academy of Sciences on June 20th, 2017. During his visit, he gave an oral presentation with the title of “Responding to hypothermia: surprises from C.elegans screens.”    

Dr. Ma introduced the progress of studies in his lab using C.elegans as a research model to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying acclimation to low temperature and hypoxia stresses. They identified genes induced by low temperature or hypoxia using RNA-seq at first and cloned the promoter of the stress-responding genes to generate reporter constructs.  

A worm strain named asp-17::GFP was obtained, which demonstrating high GFP expression upon cold stress. This strain was subjected to EMS mutagenesis to identify upstream factors regulating cold acclimation responses by forward genetics. Mutation of isy-1 was found to result in constitutive high GFP expression in the ASP-17::GFP strain. Further investigation revealed a novel signaling pathway activated by cold stress: isy-1 -> miR60 -> zip-10 -> asp-17.    

Dr. Dengke Ma is an assistant professor of University of California, San Francisco. He had published many papers in top journals including Cell, Science, Nature Neuroscience and Neuron as first or corresponding author. He was recently rewarded as a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and a Pew Scholar.