Haiying Liu
Michigan Technological University, MI·Chemistry
The inside of a living cell is not uniformly fluid. In diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the cell's interior can thicken, a property called viscosity, and proteins can misfold and clump together.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biochemistry
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
fluorescent probes
BODIPY dyes
near-infrared imaging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Design and synthesize near-infrared BODIPY dye probes that emit two colors whose ratio reports viscosity, with improved water solubility, stability and ability to enter cells.
- Target the probes to mitochondria, the endoplasmic reticulum and lysosomes to measure local viscosity and protein aggregation (clumping) in live cells, including under oxidative stress, acidity and low-oxygen conditions.
- Test how glycerol concentration, protein aggregation, cancer therapeutics, oxidative stressors and folding-helper chaperonin proteins change the probes' optical signals in solution and in cells.
- Use molecular dynamics simulations of amyloid-β and α-synuclein, plus computational modeling of the probes, to explain how protein shape changes produce the observed fluorescence responses.
More about the research
Measuring these changes in living cells is hard, because most glowing dye molecules simply get brighter or dimmer. That reading can be thrown off by uneven lighting, uneven dye uptake or differences between samples.
Why it matters
Probes that give self-calibrating, quantitative readouts of cell viscosity and protein clumping could help researchers and clinicians detect and track Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and cancer earlier. They could also help monitor how cells respond to treatment, by imaging disease-linked changes in specific organelles of living cells.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Maciej Stawikowski
Florida Atlantic University, FL·Chemistry
Design and synthesize environment-sensitive fluorescent cholesterol probes (CNDs) built on a 1,8-naphthalimide dye, using computational chemistry to tune their properties for different imaging uses.
Xiaocun Lu
Clarkson University, NY·Chemistry
Build a library of molecular force gauges, molecules that change color or glow under force, to measure compressive and tensile forces in cells and biological targets.
Stephen Miller
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Chemistry
Design and synthesize new luciferin substrates, the small molecules that firefly luciferase oxidizes to emit light, whose emission extends into the near infrared, where light penetrates animal tissue most effectively.
The school
Michigan Technological University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $107M a year on research, 86 research doctorates a year.
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