Liangyi Chen
Email：lychen（at）pku（dot）edu（dot）cn
Research Area:
In the past five years, we focused on two interweaved aspects: the continuous development of new imaging tools and their applications in exploring the regulation of glucose-stimulated insulin secretion in health and disease (single cells, islets, and in vivo). Coming from a biophysics and biomedical engineering background, I have recruited Ph.D. students with different strengths, tutored and merged them into several multidisciplinary teams, and group them to work on different but related projects. Together we have achieved successes both in developing new technologies and in finding out new mechanisms.
To visualize biological processes at the necessary resolution and in context to obtain a mechanistic understanding of health and disease has always been my goal. Been promoted to the Boya Distinguished Professor of Peking University, I want to chase after challenging projects and really make my research matter. One goal is to improve further the spatiotemporal resolution of our holistic super-resolution (SR) microscope, and integrate it with single-cell sequencing. This unique combination will bring the temporal dynamics of live-cell organelles interactome to the snapshots of molecules and signaling pathways generated by the single-cell omics methods. By longitudinal monitoring critical molecules, signaling pathways, organelles, and organelle-organelle contacts in live cells, this unique combination may enable us to visualize the complex mechanisms underlying heterogeneous disease etiologies at the single-cell level. The other goal is to develop better microscopes with large FOV and higher resolution for whole-brain imaging in the zebrafish. Using it to see every step of the emergence of learning and memory formation in live zebrafish at different scales, we hope to discover fundamental rules and concepts underlying biological brains that modern artificial intelligence may borrow.
Selected Publications:
1. Zhao W, Zhao S, Li L, Huang X, Xing S, Zhang Y, Qiu G, Han Z, Shang Y, Sun D, Shan C, Wu R, Gu L, Zhang S, Chen R, Xiao J, Mo Y, Wang J, Ji W, Chen X, Ding B, Liu Y, Mao H, Song B, Tan J, Liu J, Li H*, Chen L*. Sparse deconvolution improves the resolution of live-cell super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, Nat Biotech. article in press.
2. Zong W, Wu R*, Chen S, Wu J, Wang H, Zhao Z, Chen G, Tu R, Wu D, Hu Y, Xu Y, Wang Y, Duan Z, Wu H, Zhang Y, Zhang Y, Wang A*, Chen L*, Cheng H. Miniature two-photon microscopy for enlarged field-of-view, multi-plane and long-term brain imaging, Nat Methods. 2021 Jan;18(1):46-49.
3. Zheng X, Duan R, Li L, Xing S, Ji H, Yan H, Gao K, Wang J, Wang J*, Chen L*. Live-cell superresolution pathology reveals different molecular mechanisms of Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, Science Bulletin, 30 December 2020; 65(24): 2061-2064.
4. Zhang Y, Wang J, Xing S, Li L, Zhao S, Zhu W, Liang K, Liu L, Chen L*, Mitochondria determine the sequential propagation of the calcium macrodomains revealed by the super-resolution calcium lantern imaging, Sci China Life Sci. 2020 Oct;63(10):1543-1551.
5. Dong D, Huang X, Li L, Mao H, Mo Y, Zhang G, Zhang Z, Shen J, Liu W, Wu Z, Liu G, Liu Y, Yang H, Gong Q, Shi K*, Chen L*, Super-resolution fluorescence-assisted diffraction computational tomography reveals the three-dimensional landscape of the cellular organelle interactome, Light Sci Appl. 2020 Jan 28;9:11. doi: 10.1038/s41377-020-0249-4. eCollection 2020.
6. Zhao J, Zong W, Zhao Y, Gou D, Liang S, Shen J, Wu Y, Zheng X, Wu R, Wang X, Niu F, Wang A, Zhang Y, Xiong JW, Chen L*, Liu Y*. In Vivo imaging of β-cell function reveals glucose-mediated heterogeneity of β-cell functional development. Elife. 2019 Jan 29;8. pii: e41540. doi: 10.7554/eLife.41540.
Highlighted in Nature Reviews Endocrinology (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-019-0181-y
7. Huang X, Fan J, Li L, Liu H, Wu R, Wu Y, Wei L, Mao H, Lal A, Xi P, Tang L, Zhang Y, Liu Y, Tan S*, Chen L*. Fast, long-term super-resolution imaging with Hessian structured illumination microscopy, Nat Biotech., 2018 Jun;36(5):451-459. doi: 10.1038/nbt.4115.
Highlighted in the Nature Methods https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0023-1.
Selected as “China's Top Ten Advances in Optics in 2018”; Introduction Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Om7DPxzd0&feature=youtu.be
8. Zong W, Wu R, Li M, Hu Y, Li Y, Li J, Rong H, Wu H, Xu Y, Lu Y, Jia H, Fan M, Zhou Z, Zhang Y*, Wang A*, Chen L*, Cheng H. Fast High-resolution Miniature Two-photon Microscopy for Brain Imaging in Freely-behaving Mice. Nat Methods. 2017 Jul;14(7):713-719.
Selected as “China's Top Ten Advances in Science in 2017”, “China's Top Ten Medical Science and Technology News in 2017” and “China's Top Ten Advances in Life Science in 2017”. In 2018, the method was selected by Nature Methods as “Nature Methods: Method of the Year 2018”; Introduction Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AED0SJVAlp0
9. Yuan T, Liu L, Zhang Y, Wei L, Zhao S, Zheng X, Huang X, Boulanger J, Gueudry C, Lu J, Xie L, Du W, Zong W, Yang L, Salamero J, Liu Y*, Chen L*. Diacylglycerol Guides the Hopping of Clathrin-Coated Pits along Microtubules for Exo-Endocytosis Coupling. Dev Cell. 2015 Oct 12;35(1):120-30.
10. Zong W, Zhao J, Chen X, Lin Y, Ren H, Zhang Y, Fan M, Zhou Z, Cheng H, Sun Y*, Chen L*. Large-field high-resolution two-photon digital scanned light-sheet microscopy. Cell Res. 2015 Feb;25(2):254-7.