- Scholarship in 2023 at Imperial College London
About Zhen Ye Sin’s work
Zhen Ye Sin is a microbiologist whose current area of research is on phage interactions with bacteria in the gut. Gut microbiota is vital for maintaining metabolic health. Besides host lifestyle and genetics, our gut bacteria are regulated by bacteriophages - viruses which infect bacteria. The diversity of gut phages (virome) strongly correlates with ‘anti-phage’ systems encoded by gut bacteria.
Sin’s work aims to uncover the range of anti-phage immune systems encoded by commensal bacteria, how these systems contribute to the colonisation of commensals, and the role of phage-induced pressures in diseased states.
His project will take a multidisciplinary approach, including bioinformatics, microbiological techniques, structural biology & biochemistry, mice models, and experimental evolution experiments. Sin believes that findings from this project could have huge biomedical applications, including guiding the development of tools to modulate bacterial phenotypes and informing the development of phage therapies as an alternative to antibiotics.
Biography
Zhen Ye Sin won the Hong Kong Scholarship for Excellence Scheme in 2018, before studying BSc in Biological Sciences at Durham University, where he graduated with first-class honours in 2021. From 2021 to mid 2023, he worked as a research assistant at the Hong Kong University-Pasteur Institute Research Pole and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently carrying out his PhD studies and research at Imperial College.