Dr. Ting Xie

Biography

Ting Xie didn’t set out to discover what governs the fate of stem cells—or to show how these cells might be harnessed to treat disease. Instead, growing up surrounded in rural China, his first big interest was the plant world. That’s why Xie entered the Beijing Agricultural University to learn how to create new varieties of crops. When Xie came to the US to continue his training in plant science, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Rutgers in horticulture. But his interest changed after being exposed to developmental genetics and cell biology. “In less than a year, I realized that creating new crops wasn’t for me,” he says. It was too practical, too narrowly focused. “Although producing better vegetables, or making better looking flowers is interesting and useful,” he explains. “I was more attracted to mechanisms—how things happen.”

Research Interest

My laboratory is interested in applying a combination of molecular, genetic, genomic, developmental, and cell biological approaches to understand how adult stem cells are regulated in vivo using Drosophila and mice as model systems. An adult stem cell is defined as a cell residing in an adult tissue that can self-renew and generate differentiated cells that replace dying or damaged cells throughout an organism’s lifetime. The mechanisms governing stem cell regulation are also of great interest to understanding tissue regeneration and aging, and developing treatments for degenerative diseases and cancer. However, the molecular mechanisms governing their regulation in vivo remain largely unknown. My laboratory is currently using Drosophila ovarian germline stem cells and mouse retinal stem cells to study the molecular mechanisms underlying stem cell regulation in vivo.