My research is in three major areas
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1. Degenerative protein modifications and their impact on aging and age-related disorders
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Aging is an inevitable time-dependent decline of various physiological functions that finally leads to death. Progressive protein damage and aggregation have been proposed as the root cause of imbalance in regulatory processes and risk factors for aging and neurodegenerative diseases. Despite unambiguous evidence of the critical role of spontaneous non-enzymatic Degenerative Protein Modifications (DPMs) such as oxidation, glycation, carbonylation, carbamylation, and deamidation, that impart deleterious structural and functional protein alterations during aging and age-associated disorders, the mechanism that mediates these modifications is poorly understood. Therefore, I applied mass spectrometric technology to identify DPMs and study the impact of these post-translational modifications in aging processes and age-associated disorders like dementia.
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2. Lignocellulosic Bio-energy and applications of Proteomics technology
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Lignocellulose, a major component of plant biomass produced by photosynthesis, is abundant, renewable, and sustainable. Compared with current fossil fuel, lignocellulosic biofuel offers better advantages, such as its renewable nature, the fact that it is environmentally friendly, and its potential to mitigate global warming and prevent fuel shortage. With the main objective to prepare an enzyme cocktail for biomass hydrolysis for bioenergy, I developed proteomics technology for the quantitative profiling of lignocellulolytic enzymes. This research developed, optimized and applied label-free and quantitative proteomic techniques such as iTRAQ (isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantification) (iTRAQ), TMT (Tandem mass tags) to profile lignocellulolytic enzymes of biomass-degrading microbial strains including Trichoderma reesei, Phanerochaete chrysosporium, Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus fumigatus, Thermobifida fusca and many more
3. State of the art of aerobic granulation
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While working at National Taiwan University, Taiwan, state of the art of aerobic granulation, a novel environmental biotechnological process for biological wastewater treatment was a major project. This exciting research explored granule formation, characterization, and applications for biological wastewater treatment. I explored the impact of substrate composition, aeration intensity, settling time, organic loading rate, feeding strategy, reactor design, exchange ratio on the granulation, and optimized each parameter for stable microbial aerobic granulation. The research shed light on inter-intra-species aggregation mechanism, the role of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), single species granulation, and role of enzymes in microbial biotransformation of industrial environmental pollutants, microbial diversity and their functional role. The research also explored the applications of aerobic microbial granules for treating high organic loading, bioremediation of aromatic compounds, nitrogenous toxicants, and many more.
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