Carnegie Mellon University

Yongxin (Leon) Zhao

Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences

Address:
202A Mellon Institute
Biological Sciences, MCS
Carnegie Mellon University
4400 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Email

Yongxin Zhao
Complex biological systems are delicate machines consisting of building blocks (such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and carbohydrates) that are precisely organized in the nanoscale. Misconfiguration of these building blocks is a hallmark of cancer. Characterization of such misconfigurations in nanoscale is critical for understanding the pathogenesis of cancer as well as their accurate diagnosis and efficient development of therapeutics. To gain insight into cancer pathology, one might need to map a large diversity of nanoscale building blocks, over a wide spatial scale. To tackle this challenge, we are developing a set of novel technologies that enable large scale visualization of biological samples with nanoscale precision, by physically expanding the sample rather than magnifying the light from the sample via lenses. This principle is called expansion pathology (ExPath). By combining various material engineering and chemical approaches, we are advancing ExM-based tools that may elucidate biological insights into cancer.

Highlighted Publications

Y. Zhao (equal contribution), O. Bucur (equal contribution), H. Irshad, F. Chen, A. Weins, A. L. Stancu, E – Y. Oh, M. DiStasio, V. Torous, B. Glass, I. E. Stillman, S. J. Schnitt, A. H. Beck*, E. S. Boyden*, ‘Nanoscale imaging of clinical specimens using pathology-optimized expansion microscopy.’ Nature Biotechnology, 2017, 35 (8), 757–764.

T Wassie (equal contribution), Y. Zhao (equal contribution), E. S Boyden*, ‘Expansion Microscopy: Principles and Uses in Biology and Medicine’, Nature Methods, 2019, 16, 33–41.

A. Klimas, O. Bucur, B Njeri, Y. Zhao*, “Nanoscopic Imaging of Human Tissue Sections via Physical and Isotropic Expansion”, Journal of Visualized Experiments, 2019, (151), e60195, doi:10.3791/60195.

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Software

ExPath-reg - image registration software for aligning expanded and unexpanded Expansion Pathology (ExPath) images