Alice Zhu

Position/Role

GSAT PhD candidate

Field of Research

Computational biology

Contact

jyzhu[at]bcgsc.ca

Thesis

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) is an hematologic malignancy that constitutes about 15% of paediatric and 25% of adult ALL cases. It results from the uncontrolled clonal expansion of thymic precursors, which is known to be associated with certain oncogenes. In order to delineate the mechanism underlying this oncogenic transformation, the cord blood cells of healthy human donors were transduced with lentiviral vectors encoding different permutations of such oncogenes. It is subsequently found that only one permutation from this pool is capable of inducing T-ALL in the xenografted mice, of which the malignancy is further validated by the stably induced T-ALL in the secondary transplant. The objective is thus to profile the histone modification landscape of this pool of transduced cells, and identify the regulatory regions or genes that are differentially marked in the particular T-ALL-inducing cells.

Publications

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