Faculty

Sheng Ding 
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry
TSRI - 1999

Joint Appointments 
Cell Biology

Education 
Ph.D., The Scripps Research Institute, 2003

Research Focus 
Functional Genomic Approaches toward Regenerative Medicine

The main research focus of my laboratory is to develop and integrate chemical and functional genomic tools to study stem cell biology and regeneration. Over the past few years, we have constructed large combinatorial chemical libraries (>100,000 small molecules) and arrayed cDNA (>30,000 human and mouse genes) and RNAi (targeting over 16,000 human and mouse genes with more than three designed sequences per gene) libraries. Furthermore we have developed and implemented high throughput cellular screens of these libraries to identify small molecules and genes which can control stem cell fate in various systems (including pluripotent embryonic stem cells, multipotent adult neural stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells, and lineage-restricted somatic cells), as well as modulate specific signaling pathways. Moreover, biochemical and cellular studies, including genome-wide expression analysis using Affymetrix microarrays, affinity chromatography for target identification, and cDNA and/or RNAi complementation screens to map signaling pathway, are being used to characterize the molecular mechanism of these identified small molecules and genes. Those studies may ultimately facilitate the therapeutic application of stem cells and the development of small molecule drugs to stimulate tissue and organ regeneration in vivo.

Selected References 
Ding, S., Wu, T.Y.H., Brinker, A., Peters, E.C., Hur, W., Gray, N.S., Schultz, P.G. Synthetic Small Molecules that Control Stem Cell Fate. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100, 7632-7637, 2003.

Zheng, L., Liu, J., Batalov, S., Zhou, D., Orth, A., Ding, S. and Schultz, P.G. An approach to genome-wide screens of expressed small interfering RNAs in mammalian cells. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 135-140, 2004.

Chen, S., Zhang, Q., Wu, X., Schultz, P.G. and Ding, S. Dedifferentiation of Lineage-Committed Cells by a Small Molecule. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 126, 410-411, 2004.

Ding, S. & Schultz, P.G. A role for chemistry in stem cell biology. Nat. Biotechnol. 22, 833-840, 2004.