Principal Investigator

Dr. Adelaine Leung is a faculty member at the Veterinary Biomedical Sciences at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Saskatchewan.

Dr. Leung graduated with a BSc and MSc from the Department of Biochemistry at McMaster University. She finished her Master’s thesis in the laboratory of Dr. Albert Berghuis where she determined the structures of an inhibitor-bound lytic transglycosylase and the apo form of the aminoglycoside phosphotransferase (APH), an enzyme that confers antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Afterwards, she worked for two years as a research associate in the laboratory of Dr. David Borhani at the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, working on several structure-based drug design projects. Next, Dr. Leung joined the laboratory of Dr. Kiyoshi Nagai at the MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge, UK, where she determined the structure of the spliceosomal U4 snRNP core domain (an 8 subunit complex containing 7 proteins + 1 RNA) of her Ph.D. project. The core domain is a common structural architecture present in four of the five major spliceosomal snRNPs that participate in RNA splicing. The structure provides the first high-resolution description of the RNA-protein interactions at the heart of the core domain.  The structure also explains all the known biochemical observations and suggests the general mechanism of higher-level assemblies of snRNPs. After receiving training in structural biology, Dr. Leung became interested in the potential of teasing out molecular mechanisms underlying animal behaviours. Dr. Leung joined the laboratory of Dr. Edward Kravitz at the Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, where she investigated how neural circuits gave rise to innate behaviours by studying the fruitless circuit that is important for sexually dimorphic behaviours in Drosophila. Subsequently, Dr. Leung’s research interest expanded to understanding the molecular mechanisms of neuropsychiatric diseases. She became interested in the protein DISC1 and its protein-protein interaction network, which have been implicated in psychiatric diseases. Dr. Leung joined the Haggarty Lab (Mass General Hospital, Harvard Medical School), who previously established the role of DISC1 in the Wnt signaling pathway, and worked on the identification of chemical probes of DISC1 and GSK3b. Dr. Leung started her own laboratory in 2012 and has continued her research interest in unraveling the neurobiology of animal behaviours.

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