At 11 am on June 4th, Dr. Shupeng Li from University of Toronto brought a wonderful report for the students and teachers of our school in E104.
The research area of Dr. Li is mental disorders, including schizophrenia, depression and Alzheimer's disease. He focuses on the key proteins in some cellular pathways associated with these diseases and designes corresponding peptides to treat them. In this report, he introduced a schizophrenia susceptible gene DISC1, and its protein is downstream of the dopamine receptors in the brain. In schizophrenia models, the interaction of DISC1 and D2 receptor is enhanced. Based on this, they designed a short peptide specifically binding to DISC1, which blocked its interaction with D2 receptors. The results of the open field prepulse inhibition showed that the positive symptom of schizophrenia mice was improved.
At the same time, Dr. Li also introduced a series of research methods for protein interactions, such as Co-IP, Pull Down, two-dimensional protein electrophoresis and mass spectrometry. After the report, the teachers and students had an active discussion.
