Jin Liang

Department of Biology
The University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Phone: (301) 405-6903
E-mail: jliang2@mail.umd.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) has been a model organism for decades in developmental biology studies and has more recently there have been extensive studies on zebrafish genome sequence assemblies. I am interested in studying the molecular mechanism of zebrafish inner ear development with high-throughput techniques. Right now I am working on the expression profiling of adult zebrafish ears and comparing it with that of embryonic zebrafish ears to determine the genes that are essential for the ear development. The techniques that I am going to use include cDNA library construction, sequential analysis of gene expression (SAGE), massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS), and so on. These high-throughput techniques enable us to acquire and compare the gene expression profiles on a large scale and narrow down the scope of candidate genes efficiently.

Zebrafish can regenerate new hair cells in their lateral line after the damage induced by gentamicin. I am also very interested in looking for such kind of regeneration in zebrafish inner ears and the genes involved.

I hope that my studies with zebrafish as a model organism will also help us understand the developmental and aging mechanisms of mammal inner ears.