Researcher looks for link between human and fish retinal diseases
>>Print ViewPublication Date: 04/10/2009
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By Tiffany Teeguarden
Assistant Campus Editor
One Purdue professor’s research with zebrafish eyes could help solve the problem of blindness in humans.
Yuk Fai Leung, an assistant professor of biological sciences, does research which involves studying and finding treatments for retinal degenerative diseases that cause blindness in humans. The National Eye Institute said that blindness or low vision affects 3.3 million Americans age 40 and older. Poor eyesight can sometimes be attributed to retinal degenerative diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration.
Leung said it is hard to understand the problems with the disease or cure it unless a person has a deep understanding and appreciation of its development.
“I was studying genetics for various human eye diseases as a graduate student and became strongly aware of the complexity of the genetic architecture underlying all these problems,” Leung said. “So I decided to study the genetic networks that control eye development, which I believe is the basis for studying diseases.”
For the basis of his collaborative research, Leung used an interesting subject.
“I used zebrafish, a great vertebrate model system that has eyes more similar to humans than mice or rats,” he said. “I studied a genetic mutant of zebrafish in which the retina is not developing properly.”
He then compared the mutant retinas with normal retinas in terms of gene expression, and used a tool that allowed him to measure more than 15,000 gene expressions.
“From there we identified 731 genes that were not expressing normally in the mutant retina,” he said. “We have been trying to put these genes together in regulatory networks, which is one of the research focuses of my laboratory at Purdue.”
John Dowling, the Gund Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard and Leung’s supervisor/mentor during his research at Harvard, wrote in an e-mail that Leung was a motivated worker.
“He carried out all of the experiments, and I provided comments along the way, but the research was very much his,” Dowling said. “I think his work is outstanding, that it breaks new ground.”
Dowling said he believes Leung’s research will lead to new insights.
“In my view, it provides an approach that will eventually tell us much about how a piece of the brain develops, something we still know too little about,” he said.
Leung’s research will benefit every human being and current eye disease research that is being done.
“Our work is laying down the framework of normal development for interpreting what goes wrong in disease,” Leung said. “My group at Purdue will continue to build tools to study global gene network.”
His research requires many different academic fields and an array of different researchers who are willing to help.
“I think this is only possible in a school like Purdue University, that we have many different schools with different talents,” he said. “This was indeed one of the original reasons that drew me here to continue my research program.”