Wang Laboratory

Our Research Focus

The Wang laboratory focuses on the functions and mechanisms of selective autophagy, mTORC1 activation, and lipid metabolisms in development and neurogenesis of postnatal neural stem cells. We are studying the functions of autophagy mediated lipid catabolism in regulating mTORC1 hyperactivation in Tsc1-deficient neural stem cells. The lab also developed novel genetic mouse models to study different autophagy genes in microglia for the maintenance and differentiation of neural stem cells in neuroinflammation and in neurodegenerative disease, e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease. We are very interested in the roles of selective autophagy in glia (astrocyte and microglia) for the coevolution of microenvironment with brain metastatic cancers from breast, lung, and melanoma. We are using a variety of genetically engineered mouse models combined with single cell RNA-seq, single cell tracing, chemogenetics, clarity technique, metabolic/molecular/cellular approaches to gain insights of crosstalk between glia with neural stem cell and glia with metastatic cancers in vivo.