Henderson ZhU

mPhil Student

hz367@cam.ac.uk

About me

Through my undergraduate studies, I developed a curiosity towards the biology of the cell. The Gershlick lab and the CIMR are supportive and innovative environments where many amazing curiosity-driven research are being conducted. I am glad to be a member of the community and is enjoying my research at the lab. My primary focus is to characterise a novel compound heterozygous mutation in the protein VPS51. VPS51 is a conserved subunit in both Golgi-Associated Retrograde Protein (GARP) and Endosome-Associated Recycling Protein (EARP) complexes, which are proteins involved in retrograde transport and endocytic recycling respectively. Mutations in VPS51 leads to a series of developmental defects, including severe global developmental delays.

My project has two stages, the first stage will aim to characterise the new compound heterozygous mutations by reconstituting them in VPS51-knockout cell lines followed by using trafficking assays and confocal microscopy. This part will be done in collaboration with Dr Everman and Dr Steet at Greenwood Genetic Center (SC, USA). These will allow a complete functional characterisation of the mutations. The second phase is to develop a split-GFP-based trafficking assay to comparatively analyse mutations in VPS51 and other analogous opathies. The functional readouts of this platform will serve as a basis for drug developments and disease modelling.

Publications

Mammalian lectin arrays for screening host-microbe interactions

Jégouzo, S.A.F., Nelson, C., Hardwick, T., Wong, S.T.A., Lau, N.K.K., Neoh, G.K.E., Castellanos-Rueda, R., Huang, Z., Mignot, B., Hirdaramani, A., Howitt, A., Frewin, K., Shen, Z., Fox, R.J., Wong, R., Ando, M., Emony, L., Zhu, H., Holder, A., Werling, D., Krishnan, N., Robertson, B.D., Clements, A., Taylor, M.E., Drickamer, K. (2020) Journal of Biological Chemistry

Background

10/2019 - Present

MPhil in Medical Sciences

University of Cambridge

10/2016 - 06/2019

BSc in Biochemistry

Imperial College London

8/2017 - 9/2017

R&D Summer Internship

Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals, Shanghai

7/2015 - 8/2015

Value Stream Summer Internship

GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, Shanghai