Cheng-Ming Chuong
University of Southern California, CA·Biology
Skin is not the same everywhere. Scalp, palm and sole each grow different structures, and skin appendages such as hair and feathers keep regrowing throughout life.
- Fields
Biology
Genetics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
skin development
skin appendages
feathers
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Test whether skin morphogenesis is built from linked sensor–actuator modules that turn physical cues, such as adhesion forces and ECM pulling, into gene activity, using living skin and organ explants.
- Extend studies of repeated appendage formation, cyclic follicle renewal and muscle network assembly in developing skin, focusing on mechanical and epigenetic controls.
- Determine whether chicken feather length is set by stem cells or outside signals, using gene misexpression and single-cell RNA analyses across body sites, ages and chicken variants.
- Profile how sex hormones reset epigenetic states of feather stem cells and niches, by removing hens' ovaries or giving males estradiol to switch sickle-feather forms.
- Test whether dermis in scalp, dorsal and shank skin carries distinct epigenetic profiles that direct Wnt, FGF and BMP signals, using ATAC-seq and 3D chromatin interaction maps.
- Investigate how a 195-base-pair duplication near HoxC10, a body-region patterning gene, turns combs into feathers in Polish chickens, combining tissue transplantation with omics.
More about the research
Skin substitutes made for burn and injury patients lack this regional variety. Making better ones requires knowing how tissue patterns form, how they adapt over a lifetime and how they are set region by region. Chickens are the main model because their skin grows feathers, scales and combs in distinct patterns and regrows feathers in cycles. These three projects ask how cells read physical and chemical signals, and how epigenetic controls, the switches that turn genes on or off without changing the DNA sequence, build and reshape skin.
Why it matters
Patients with severe skin injuries rely on lab-grown skin substitutes, but these lack the region-specific features of real skin, such as scalp hair or palm skin. Learning how skin patterns, regional identity and adaptive regrowth are controlled could help guide skin stem cells to form properly functioning tissue. It could also improve engineered skin for future regenerative medicine.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Randall Widelitz
University of Southern California, CA·Biology
Map the natural bioelectric landscape of developing avian skin explants and test how much feather bud orientation depends on it, building on the finding that synchronized calcium channel oscillations in bud dermal cells set elongation direction.
Amy Shyer
Rockefeller University, NY·Biology·Early-career
Map where and when morphogens, developmental signals, are expressed in the forming skin follicle, and link that activity to gene expression profiles and multicellular architecture.
Ryan Driskell
Washington State University, WA·Biology
Test whether Lef1, a Wnt-pathway transcription factor, is the master regulator of newborn papillary fibroblast function by switching it on in adult mouse skin fibroblasts and using wounding and chamber grafting assays to see if scarring gives way to regeneration.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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