Lin Lab

Cardiovascular diseases and obesity are two major complications associated with a high risk of mortality and morbidity; however, therapeutic ways of improving these two complications are limited. In our body, the heart pumps blood to support circulation and the brown adipose tissue generates heat to keep thermal homeostasis. Pathological stress that impairs these two organs may lead to cardiovascular diseases and obesity, respectively. My laboratory is interested in studying how heart and brown adipose tissue grow and how these two organs react to pathological stress, with a long-term goal of seeking fundamental knowledge to deepen our understanding of these two organs and to inform the efforts of reducing cardiovascular diseases and obesity.

The Hippo-YAP signaling is a newly discovered integrative pathway that controls organ growth, metabolism and innate/adaptive immunity. To reach our goal, we use Hippo-YAP pathway as a probe to investigate several basic questions: 1) how heart and classical brown adipose tissue grow and mature; 2) how heart muscle cells and brown fat cells cope with pathological stress; 3) how to salvage heart muscle cells and brown fat cells under disease-stress conditions.

My lab performs tissue-specific gene gain- and loss-of-function studies to analyze the pathophysiological roles of Hippo-YAP pathway in the heart and brown adipose tissue. We also use Adenovirus-associated-virus (AAV) and modified messenger RNA as gene delivery platforms to carry out translational studies, aiming to develop drug candidates for treating cardiovascular diseases and obesity.

Zhiqiang Lin, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Professor of Biomedical Research and Translational Medicine
    Gene Therapy Core Manager, MMRI

Email : , Phone : 315-624-7491

Dr.Lin got his Ph.D from Peking University in 2008, and joined in William T. Pu’s lab in 2009 as a postdoc. In 2013, Dr. Lin was appointed as an instructor and started building up his research projects. In 2018, Dr. Lin was recruited to MMRI as an assistant professor and principle investigator. Since then, Dr. Lin has developed projects related with cardiovascular diseases and obesity. The long-term goal of Lin lab is to understand the basic molecular mechanisms controlling organ/tissue growth, and to apply the newly acquired knowledge for reducing cardiovascular diseases and obesity.

Research Assistants

-Amanda Davenport

-Aaron Farley

Post Doctoral Fellows

-Farheen Naz, Ph.D.

-Genyu Wang, Ph.D.

2021

1. YAP/TEAD1 Complex Is a Default Repressor of Cardiac Toll-Like Receptor Genes. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/13/6649

2. Selectively expressing SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein S1 subunit in cardiomyocytes induces cardiac hypertrophy in mice.             https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.20.448993v1

Before 2021

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/zhiqiang.lin.2/bibliography/public/