Chunyue Yin, PhD

Biography

Dr. Yin conducted her doctoral research in Dr. Lilianna Solnica-Krezel’s laboratory at Vanderbilt University, where she investigated the molecular regulation of cell movements during zebrafish gastrulation and revealed the impact of gastrulation movements on somite development. In parallel, she participated in a forward genetic screen to identify novel regulators of zebrafish early development. She identified the calamity mutant that exhibits defects in notochord formation and pigmentation. Subsequent positional cloning revealed that a mutation in the atp7a gene, the zebrafish homolog of the human Menkes disease gene, was responsible for the calamity mutant phenotypes. 

With a strong interest in building zebrafish models for human diseases, she decided to conduct her postdoctoral research in Dr. Didier Stainier’s laboratory, which is at the forefront of zebrafish digestive organ research. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to study pancreas development in zebrafish hands-off/han mutants that carry a mutation in the transcription factor gene hand2. Her research led to the discovery that the defective pancreatic development in han mutants is due to a failure in asymmetric gut looping. She also showed that gut-looping morphogenesis is dependent on extracellular matrix remodeling and revealed novel roles for Hand2 in this process. This work was published in Developmental Cell in 2010. Her work is now focused on the hepatic stellate cells and hepatic biliary cells. She has developed transgenic lines that mark these cell types and will use them and related reagents to characterize the cellular behaviors of these cells in liver development and disease, as well as the underlying molecular regulations.