Author: jing.hughes

Samantha Adamson, MD PhD, returns from maternity leave and celebrates her birthday with the lab. Great to have you back, Samantha!

A winning talk on cilia regulation of GLP-1 signaling!

Xinhang’s many gorgeous islet cilia images featured in our expansion microscopy manuscript https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.06.611752v1

Bella Melena, 3rd year MSTP student in our lab, won a travel grant to the 60th EASD Meeting in Madrid, Spain. Bella will present her work on primary cilia regulation of GLP-1 signaling.

Our newest lab member, Faye DiGruccio, was born today, 8 lb 9 oz and a full head of hair. Congratulations Samantha and Michael!

We had a strong showing at the Midwest Islet Club in Chicago, with 5 of 6 lab members attending. Shannon rocked her talk, and we had two poster presentations. It was a great trip filled with science, food, and friends.

Decoding cilia protein composition, one immunogold antibody at a time. This labor of love now published in Journal of Cell Science. Read the First Person interview of our first-author Sanja Sviben. WU Dept of Medicine coverage here.

Our scanning electron microscopy study of islet cilia structure (Polino et al PNAS 2023) is highlighted in Science Snapshot in The Scientist Magazine. Image shows a human islet beta cell with a primary cilium projecting from its microvilli-covered surface, scale 1 um.

Xinhang Dong gave a fantastic masters thesis defense in Biomedical Engineering, “Applying Expansion Microscopy to Visualize Dynein Expression in Islet Cilia.” We are so proud of her as the first graduate student to defend in the lab!

Jeong Hun’s work recognized at the Asia Islet Biology & Incretin Symposium, March 28-30, 2024.

What better way to celebrate us? Clementine’s in the Central West End.

Michelle Phan, first-year DBBS student, joined our lab as a rotation student. She will be playing with microscopes and helping us expand our research questions on beta cell cilia. Lab lunch today to celebrate Michelle (first from the right in photo).

Our postdoc Jeong Hun was the winner of the 2023 Microscopy Image Competition. Thanks Proteintech! Mouse islet; green, acetylated alpha tubulin; red, FOP basal body marker; blue, DAPI

Jing and Eun Young both gave invited talks at the International Congress of Diabetes and Metabolism (ICDM) in October 2023 in Gyeongju, Korea. Picture of attendees of the Presidential Dinner.

We are excited to host Jon Beirne for his PhD rotation. Jon is a seasoned experimentalist and has aspirations toward studying RNA biology in metabolism.

A job well-done! We are excited for you to begin your thesis research.

The lab went out for lunch to celebrate our new postdoc Shannon Townsend. Shannon trained with Maureen Gannon for her PhD at Vanderbilt and is from Queens, NY. We are going to do great things, Shannon!

Xinhang Dong from McKelvey School of Engineering joins as a new graduate student in the lab. She received her undergrad degree from ShanghaiTech University and is wicked good at programming. Welcome to the group!

Team work makes the dream work – cover story in PNAS this week! Read the paper here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302624120

Eun Young’s review article “Rediscovering Primary Cilia in Pancreatic Islets” is now published in Diabetes & Metabolism Journal. Download PDF here: https://doi.org/10.4093/dmj.2022.0442

Dr. Samantha Adamson, PGY6 fellow and soon to be instructor, receives the National NIH Physician Scientist DiabDocs-K12 program award for 2023-2024. She joins a select group of future leaders in diabetes research and clinical care. Congratulations Samantha!

Samantha and Jing attended the 2023 American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) meeting in Chicago. The WashU MSTP community was well-represented at the meeting. Photographed: Samantha Adamson, Jing Hughes, Max Petersen

A bittersweet send-off to Dr Eun Young Lee, who returns to Korea to resume clinical work in diabetes. She will be missed dearly.

MSTP student Bella Melena publishes a review article on islet cilia and glucose regulation. Read it here: doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2022.1082193

Our finding of motile primary cilia is reviewed in this blog article from Proteintech, a company whose antibodies aided our discovery.

We send Lifei our very best wishes as she begins her postdoctoral position in the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University.

Going against scientific canon, we describe primary cilia that can move. Read our story and the companion editorial from Science Advances.

Lead author Alex Li and colleagues publish methods paper on cilia imaging in Frontiers in Endocrinology. Well done, Alex and team!

Bella Melena, 2nd year WUSM student, joins the lab as a PhD student. We are so happy for Bella entering the MSTP program and staying for her thesis work!

Postdoc Jung Hoon represents our lab at the 2022 HIRN meeting in Washington D.C.

Our review on modeling islet cilia mutations in diabetes, now published in Frontiers in Endocrinology. Great work, Jung Hoon!