Dr. Zhen Liu is the head of the Laboratory of Reproductive Engineering in Primates. He graduated from Shandong Normal University with a B.S. degree in Biotechnology (2010) and received his Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience from the Institute of Neuroscience (ION), Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017. After completing Ph.D., he continued postdoctoral research with Muming Poo and Qiang Sun in the Institute of Neuroscience (2017-2018). Dr. Liu joined ION as a Principal Investigator in September 2018.

Title: Genetic approaches in generating monkey models for brain study

Abstract:

Gene-modified models play crucial roles in the study of brain development, function and disease. However, gene-modified monkey model has not been widely used in brain study. In this report, I will make an introduction about different genetic approaches in generating gene-modified monkey models for brain study. Then, I will focus on introducing our recent study of monkey chimera using embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cell chimera has been widely used for generating gene-modified mouse model. However, monkey chimera generation using embryonic stem cell has not been well established. Here, we have systematically tested various culture conditions for establishing monkey naive embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and optimized the procedures for chimeric embryo culture. This approach generated an aborted fetus and a live chimeric monkey with high donor cell contribution. A stringent characterization pipeline demonstrated that donor cells efficiently (up to 90%) incorporated into various tissues (including the gonads and placenta) of the chimeric monkeys. Our chimeric monkey study has major implications for the study of primate naive pluripotency and genetic engineering of non-human primates.