- These underlie human diseases, human health and aging, and fertility. With advanced maternal age, how do we treat and improve development for all families?
- This leads to an interest in GTPases. The Rho/Ras family proteins are critical in regulating cell movement and development. Many of the GEFs/GAPs are unstudied, for example Arhgef40.
- AlphaFold has provided a wealth of structures that pave the way for our understanding of protein function. Some are even novel domains unique to other organisms. Yet these domains require the human eye to analyze and discover why they evolved.
- More than 25% of zebrafish genes have still not been assigned names, and even fewer of these are fully understood. Many gene families such as the TLRs are greatly expanded in other organisms: what is the outcome of all this diversity and why did it arise?
- Plants lack Rho GTPases, but evolved a whole new family, the Rop proteins. Mapping the understudied proteome will provide cross-kingdom insights into how organisms solve problems.
- Can we develop tools to study proteins in other organisms with unique life cycles and lifestyles? e.g. snails?
- Babies are super resilient. For example, when covid hit, our newborn baby was completely unfazed by it, not even breaking out with a fever. What governs these abilities?
- How do babies' skin and immune cells grow and reshape upon encountering new organisms? How does our urban built environment shape the ways we grow up? Can avoiding or encouraging contact with certain germs help us?
- Pregnancy is one of the most miraculous and drastic changes in a woman's life. How does this complex developmental process roll out and how are immune cells entrained within it? We can use model organisms and embryos to study this question.
- We are currently living in a comfortable, technologically advanced world. Most food we consume is highly processed and refrigerated to be kept safe and edible. But for most of human existence and in many cultures today, these strategies for food preservation do not exist. How does our body deal with spoiled food or food left out for a long time without getting sick? Is it possible to train our immunity to these microbes we live alongside?
- How does passed-down knowledge from our grandparents inform the ways that we should keep food with a view to save energy, avoid food waste, and eat more healthy? Is is possible to update our guidelines for a healthier diet?
- Is there truth to the superstition that drinking hot water is better than cold? What are the determinants of gut health with respect to food and immunity? How can we nurture a healthy gut ecosystem and be more resilient?
- I aim to establish the first research institute in Toronto to study traditional Chinese medicine herbs and concepts. To date, research into this field has not gotten much traction, and the papers that have been published suffer from poor quality or lack of depth.
- TCM principles provide the promise of a unifying framework to illnesses that transcends disciplines and could make connections between autoinflammation, fitness, mental health and diet. For example, the hot-cold foods paradigm and the five organ systems paradigm are rooted in centuries of doctors' direct observation and hypothesis generation.
- The power of chemical genetics builds on traditional forward and reverse genetic screens by incorporating libraries of herbal and chemical compounds. We can find common mechanisms of action for different classes of medicines, optimize combinations to minimize side effects, and predict new drugs by learning from the principles we discover.
- In collaboration with the Toronto School of TCM and MaRS, we aim to start an incubator to study these herbs and principles.
- Instead of million-dollar drugs, we operate on the principle of developing drinkable therapies that could be consumed by the everyday citizen and help to proactively improve health and ward off aging and disease.
- Despite longstanding software packages such as GROMACS which are powerful at visualizing the true way that proteins move, there has been little progress in adapting and scaling these methods to take advantage of the wealth of new structures available.
- It is now widely accepted that many proteins do not have a single, stable structure, but contain intrinsically disordered regions that are nonetheless critical for phosphorylation, autoinhibition or aggregation.
- Bringing these tools into the 21st century can aid in science outreach and help to change the way we think about protein structure from static to dynamic.
- Repetitive Westerns
- Outdated and non quantitative methods
- RNAseq without a good reason
- The subjective over the objective e.g. phosphoproteomics.
1. Human health, rare diseases, pediatric syndromes, fertility, severe malformations.
2. Basic understanding of the unstudied proteome and its connections.
3. An appreciation of how mechanisms + paradigms are shared across kingdoms.
4. Knowledge of developmental pathways that impact model organisms, aging.
5. Impact on fertility + growth of crops, agriculture.
6. Discover new affordable and drinkable TCM therapies for improving general health.
7. Pregnancy and babies immunity. Help the next generation.
8. Integrate and bring together siloed fields, develop new programs and expertise in methods.