Ming Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine

Sijie Chen is one of the co-investigators together with Prof Ben Zhong Tang, our MWLC associate member, who is the main applicant for the application titled “New Aggregation-Induced Emission Systems: Solving the Existing Problems in Bioimaging and Developing New Biological Applications”. The application has been awarded HKD 6,400,000 from Research Grants Council (RGC) under the Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) Scheme (2020/21). The team comprises eight faculty members from five institutes with complementary expertise in organic chemistry, photochemistry, biology, and medicine. They aim to develop new AIEgens with emission in the second near-infrared window, persistent room-temperature phosphorescence and chemiluminescence. These molecules are anticipated to solve the existing problems in bioimaging.

Stem cell research is fundamental for reparative medicine, which with the help of the body's cells, recreates and heals important organs. Now, Fredrik Lanner’s team, together with researchers at SickKids in Canada and KU Leuven in Belgium, have developed a method for defining the most general type of stem cells, that can develop into all cell types in the body. The study of totipotent stem cells in mice has been published in Nature Cell Biology.

Congratulations to Simon Elsässer for being one of the eight awarded candidates for the Consolidator grant! Karolinska Institutet established the Consolidator grant to give the most prominent younger researchers the opportunity to consolidate their research and broaden their activities. The eight awarded candidates this year were selected from 63 qualified applicants, and they would receive up to 1.2 million SEK per year over five years.

The Castelo-Branco lab has previously shown that mature oligodendrocytes show transcriptional heterogeneity (Marques et al., Science 2016). In their latest publication in Nature Communications,  they showed that distinct mouse mature oligodendrocytes populations have spatial preference in the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) and different responses to spinal cord injury.

Researchers have been using light microscopes and fluorescent proteins to study how proteins work inside human cells, however they face limitations in studying microproteins which are much smaller than typical proteins, and thus are often overlooked. Simon Elsässer’s team has now developed a method, termed STELLA, which allows fluorescent tagging of proteins with the smallest imaginable perturbation - a single amino acid building block added genetically on either end of the protein. With STELLA, the team was also able to label and localize a number of elusive polypeptides produced by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causing COVID-19.