Xu Chenqi

Biography

XU Chenqi is a Professor Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China. Research Areas: lymphocyte signaling.

Research Interest

To sense and fight with invading foreign pathogens or transformed self cells, mammalian immune systems develop sophisticated panels of immunoreceptors to conduct immune response and immune surveillance function. Many immunoreceptors are ideal drug targets for human diseases such as autoimmune diseases and cancers. Despite of their great clinical interest, we are still on early stage to fully understand the structure and function of immunoreceptors. The long term interest of the Xu lab is to study key immunoreceptor signaling in T cells as well as provide knowledge base for the development of better therapeutic approaches to treat human diseases. In 2008, we found T cell antigen receptor (TCR) phosphorylation is regulated via the dynamic interaction between TCR intracellular tyrosine motifs and plasma membrane (Xu et al, 2008). This work unveils the presence of an unexpected plasma membrane regulation to immunoreceptor activation other than the well-studied kinase-phosphatase regulation. In addition to study immunoreceptor activation mechanism, we are currently utilizing functional and structural approaches to identify and characterize new signaling proteins involved in immunoreceptor signaling and their roles in human cancers. These studies will advance our knowledge about T cell signaling as well as identify potential drug targets for treating human cancers.