Brief animation of gut stem cells at work. In the center is a villus. 6-8 crypts surround its base. Stem cells reside at the bottom of the crypts of Lieberkuehn. It only take 4-5 days for stem cell daughters to complete their journey to villus tip, after which they sadly die

Our study on hair follicle stem cell aging is published Nature Aging nature.com/articles/s4358…. By directly imaging live hair follicles, we found the evidence of stem cells escaping from their niche, likely due to reduced cell adhesion and compromised ECM. 1/3

This work is done by a fantastic graduate student, Chi Zhang, who’s also a NCI F99/K00 fellow. He’s also looking for a postdoc lab in cancer genomics and immunology. PIs look out! 2/3

It’s also a close collaboration with Robin Dowell. And it can’t be done w/o microscope core led by James Orth MCDB at CU Boulder💉😷🧬 3/3

Chi’s story can’t be completed without the videos. How to capture and study these escaping cells? Also check out a report The New York Times NYT Health nytimes.com/2021/10/04/hea…

Thanks to Cheng-Ming Chuong, Charles Chan and Sarah Millar for providing interesting comments on our story.

Happy to share our new work on H4K16ac and MOF. We revealed the unexpected link between MOF and electron transport chain and MOF-mediated transcription of ciliary genes in the skin. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…