主题：Engineering Modified Nucleic Acids for Bioimaging Applications

报告人：Professor Quanbing Mou

时间：2024年6月11日（周二）15：00

地点：徐名材报告厅（霞光楼200）

邀请人：朱新远 教授 / 颜德岳 教授

个人简介

Dr. Quanbing Mou is an Assistant Professor, Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator, and Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Junior Faculty Chair in the Department of Chemistry at Rice University. He earned his B.E. degree in Polymer Science and Engineering from Sichuan University, where he conducted research in Prof. Changsheng Zhao’s group on the synthesis of sulfonated polyethersulfone membranes for blood purification. In 2012, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His thesis work, supervised by Profs. Deyue Yan, Xinyuan Zhu, and Chuan Zhang, focused on nucleoside analog-containing precise nanodrugs for cancer therapy. In 2018, Dr. Mou joined Prof. Yi Lu's laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a postdoctoral researcher. There, he concentrated on engineering DNAzyme-based biosensors for metal ion detection and developing in-situ biosensors to image metabolites and bioproducts in plants. In 2021, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin with Prof. Yi Lu, where he explored new research areas, including engineering CRISPR/Cas systems for biosensing and biomedical applications, developing a super-resolution imaging technique called DNAzyme-PAINT for metal ion detection in living systems, and creating innovative caging strategies for DNAzyme-based biosensing. In his independent lab, Dr. Mou focuses on building various chemical biology tools to understand RNA biology and promote the applications of RNA-related technologies.

报告摘要

Nucleic acids are essential not only as carriers of genetic information but also as versatile functional materials. Modifications of nucleic acids play a crucial role in transmitting genetic information and enhancing the effectiveness as functional materials. In this seminar, I will discuss two applications of engineered modified nucleic acids in bioimaging.
Firstly, I will discuss how nucleic acid modifications can drastically improve the delivery efficiency of nucleic acids in plant cells for glucose bioimaging. Plants are promising renewable resources for biofuel production, which still face the challenge of developing new plant species with high productivity in energy molecules, such as glucose. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop in situ glucose bioimaging tools to guide plant engineering. Traditional glucose aptamer-based sensors face delivery challenges in intact plants. To overcome this challenge, I have developed a thiol-mediated uptake method that efficiently introduces nucleic acids into plant cells. This method allows for effective in situ imaging of glucose in plants, which serves as a new platform to guide the plant engineering for biofuel production. 
Secondly, I will introduce the development of super-resolution imaging tools for 3D Mg2+ imaging in single cells. Mg2+ is related to various diseases, including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and hypertension. However, how Mg2+ is regulated in single cells remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, I have created a novel super-resolution bioimaging tool for Mg2+, DNAzyme-PAINT, which incorporates modifications like disulfide repeats, photocage-dG, and locked nucleic acids. This tool has enabled the first time 3D super-resolution imaging of free Mg2+ in single cells, revealing a strong association between Mg2+ and mitochondria. This methodology can be generalized to study other metal ions by altering the DNAzyme.