Heitman Lab Members

Chaoyang Xue, PhD Post-Doctoral Fellow 312 CARL Building Box 3546 DUMC Durham, N.C. 27710 Phone: 919.684.9702 Fax: 919.684.5458 Email: xuecy@duke.edu

I received my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Biotechnology Institute at Zhejiang University in China. My master’s and doctoral studies both involved virus mutagenesis and hybrid viruses generation. I specifically studied the regions of several virus genomes that are important for the interactions between Tobamoviruses and their host plants. I joined Dr. Jin-Rong Xu’s lab at Purdue University after I received my Ph.D. in 2000. My research at Purdue focused on the functional study of the genes related to the cyclin-AMP and the PMK1 MAP kinase signal transduction pathways and their involvement in the fungal development and pathogenicity in the model plant fungal pathogen, Magnaporthe grisea. I joined Dr. Heitman’s lab in April 2004 to further pursue my research interests on the signaling regulation in the important human opportunistic fungal pathogen, Cryptococcus neoformans. My current focus is elucidating the receptor(s) for the G protein alpha subunit, which is a component in the cAMP signal pathway and is essential for fungal fertility and virulence. The project also involves the study of the proteins interacting with G proteins in C. neoformans.