Prof Mingjie ZHANG, Chair Professor of Biochemistry at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his team of researchers, including Dr Cong YU, Dr Wei FENG and Dr Zhiyi WEI, have made breakthrough discovery on how motor proteins like myosin VI behave.
As the myosin VI protein is essential to the well being of cells in general and its mutation is known to cause hereditary blindness and deafness as well as cancer, this discovery is expected to have far reaching and fundamental impact on medical science.
This ground-breaking study by Prof Zhang and his team was published in the 7 August 2009 issue of Cell, one of the most prestigious journals in life science.
“Our study on myosin proteins started eight years ago, but for the first three years we did not make significant breakthrough. In 2004 a new team of researchers was formed to continue with the research. The team did over 10,000 experiments but again encountered numerous failures until last November when we finally made a discovery on how motor proteins move in human cells,” said Prof Zhang.
For media enquiries, please feel free to contact :
Ross Lai
Tel: 2358 6306 / 9103 2928
Email: rosslai@ust.hk
Donna Wong
Tel: 2358 6317
Email: donnaw@ust.hk
