Andrew Hutchins

Biography

I am from the UK and have a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia. I have been studying in Asia for more than a decade. I first went to the Genome Institute of Singapore to study embryonic stem cells and their use in regenerative medicine. And then moved to Japan, the University of Osaka's Immunology Frontier Research Center (Immunology Frontier Research Center) mainly study the immune system. He came to China in 2013 and returned to the field of research on embryonic stem cells at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health (GIBH), Chinese Academy of Sciences. And then came to Shenzhen, where he worked as an assistant professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and was engaged in research and teaching. My research combined with computer technology and bio-experimental techniques, to study and understand the different types of cells in the organization, to understand the interaction of cells in the normal state and how the cells in the event of illness. I am particularly interested in the direction of endogenous retroviruses, the complexity of gene expression modeling and the use of single cell genomics to understand the cell type.

Research Interest

My lab currently has two goals: The first goal, we will create complex human disease models such as Crohn's disease and Parkinson's disease. These diseases are not simply inherited, and appear to be a highly complex combination of DNA, environment, and cell interactions. We do not understand what causes these diseases, and even this type of disease is only a less reliable understanding. In the lab, we try to use genomic editing techniques and computer technology to help us understand what leads to these diseases.The second goal is to understand why we have so much "useless" DNA. Our genome encodes only about 4% of the gene, and the other 96% does not seem important, which includes a large number of old viral replicates of inserted fragments of the genome, and other parasite DNA fragments. I (and others) think that all these extra DNA is actually very important, and we are trying to figure out what they are going on and why is that so. The two parts seem totally irrelevant, but in fact they are the same. Many DNA mutations are associated with complex diseases such as Crohn's disease, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. Many DNA mutations are not in the gene, and on the contrary, these mutations occur in 96% of the "useless" DNA sequences. We have already begun to understand why all these 96% "useless" DNA exist, and perhaps by understanding this, we will learn more about complex diseases.