We are happy to announce that the Thomas L. Patterson Graduate Fellowship 2023 goes to Zihao Yu from the Lanying Zeng lab. This fellowship is generously funded by Drs. Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson since 2019 to encourage graduate-level phage research at the CPT.
Zihao Yu is currently a 5th year Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Lanying Zeng at CPT. He received his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Chongqing University, China in 2017. His Ph.D. research aims to understand some of the most fundamental mechanisms during phage development. He has focused on using fluorescence microscopy techniques to visualize individual phage genomes and quantitatively analyze the processes of genome translocation and replication dynamics. The working systems were mainly the paradigm temperate phage lambda and the single-stranded RNA phage PP7. For phage lambda, Zihao developed a live-cell phage DNA labeling technique and computational analysis algorithms that allowed him to track and quantify individual copies of phage genomic DNA and correlate them with the lysis-lysogeny decision process. For phage PP7, he developed tools for high-throughput analysis of single copies of viral RNA genomes and the effect of phage infection on host cell mobility. In addition to these two phages, he was able to apply the techniques to some of the newly discovered phage-host systems, such as understanding the mechanism of anti-phage nuclease functions. Check out more on his research here: https://sites.google.com/view/lzeng.