Daqi Deng
Undergraduate
Education
2016 – now Bachelor of Biology
Department of Biology GPA 3.73/4, Rank 5/25
Southern University of Science and Technology
Research interests
My research interests lie in the interplay of mutations within tumor cells and their phenotypical impacts on tumors. Cancer has been posing a big obstacle to mankind, in scientific field as well as public society. Over one hundred year after cancer was demonstrated as an inherited disease, cancer research has achieved lots of milestones. We have known that cancer arises from accumulation of mutations, and we also know different cancer types possess different driver mutation profiles. However, we do not know the reasons, which can have great clinical applications. And we also do not know how driver mutations interact with each other in the surrounding of cell dynamic network. For a specific case-colorectal cancer, previous researches have found it always arising from some driver mutations (APC, KRAS, TP53 and SMAD4) with a specific sequence, but the mechanism of this pattern is unknown. And how they coordinate to facilitate tumor formation? I am particularly interested in the questions about the cellular network perturbation caused by mutations during tumor formation and progression.
Research Experience
2017.9 – current
Project: Reconstruct tumor evolution in mouse intestinal organoid by sequential mutagenesis
As an undergraduate researcher, I conduct this project with the help of my advising professors. Interested in the question that why colorectal cancer has a specific combination of mutations, we are utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 and organoid culture technologies to generate a series of organoids with different mutation combinations. And they compete with each other like an evolutionary process. Finally, we use single cell sequencing to decipher the underlying mechanisms.
2018.11 – current
Project: Mechanism of RUNX2 in WNT signaling pathway
We find that RUNX2 can regulate WNT pathway and may also be regulated by WNT pathway. I have packaged some overexpression viral vectors to generate some stable cell lines and study the underlying mechanism.
2017.10 – 2018.10
iGEM competition
I am the co-leader of SUSTech’s iGEM team. We focused on the construction of a novel double emulsion system, which can generate numerous isolated droplets containing two single cells. This system can be used to study cell-cell communication.
All of those projects are supervised by Prof. Wei Chen and conducted in his lab in SUSTech.