Human Genetics of Metabolic Diseases
The Chen Lab leverages data from genome-wide association studies to disentangle the mechanisms behind diabetes and obesity. Most of our work is now focused on (1) discovering of the genetic and life style causal factors of diabetes and its complications, and (2) validating the biological functions of these causal factors using cell or animal models.
NEWS
Some ideas on cross innovation(Lin HE)
Interdisciplinarity has always been the source of technological innovation. The fact that a large number of Nobel Prize winners come from interdisciplinary is the best example. But how to achieve the success of interdisciplinary and the landing of interdisciplinary innovation seems to be far from as simple as listing a dozen disciplines in the "key materials", planning a few development zones, and establishing a few "X" science associations. read more
RESEARCH
Disease Biomarkers
We work under a multi-omics framework in searching for biomarkers of diabetes complications, like retinopathy, heart disease or liver disease.
Our publications give more information.
Medelian Randomization Analysis
We conducted a phenotype-wide MR analysis using the phenotype and genotype data from UK Biobank (500K people, 4000 phenotypes and 13.7M SNPs). A database which included our pair-wise MR result and its web interface are under construction.
Cell/animal Works
To validate or discover the biological functions of a biomarker that we identified to be associated with diabetes conplicataions, we make cell/animal models that best mimic the complication conditions and investigate the impact of these biomarkers on the onset or therapy of the complication.
We are affiliated with College of Basic Medical Sciences of Jilin University. We collaborate with friends from Wayne State University, National Institutes of Health and University of Arizona, etc.
