Bioanalytical Chemist is Inventing New DNA-based Probes

Assistant professor Mingxu You, chemistry, and M2M recently received a five-year, $1.9 million NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) to fund his research in developing new tools – DNA-based probes– to quantify intercellular mechanical forces and understand a variety of mechano-sensitive cell signaling events at the molecular level.

As he explains, intercellular forces are critical regulators in many physiological and pathological processes, but scientists have until recently lacked the tools and approaches to characterize these mechanical events. “It is a whole new way to understand growth, division, intercellular motion and interaction,” You says.

Cells are usually touching each other or a substrate, pushing and pulling each other to work together as a tissue, an organ and at the whole body level, he adds. But these forces are so tiny and ever-changing, it is very hard to see how cells are physically communicating with each other, for example, during development, cell differentiation, normal physiological and various disease processes.

The You Lab, which includes postdoctoral researcher Bin Zhao and chemistry PhD students Yousef Baheri and Puspam Keshri, will team with biologists Barbara Osborne and Tom Maresca, Lisa Minter of veterinary and animal sciences and Yubing Sun, mechanical and industrial engineering, to further develop these DNA-based tools to visualize, monitor and quantify such cellular forces.