Long Hin Tsang 曾朗軒

  • Scholarship in 2022 at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics

About Long Hin Tsang’s work

Long Hin Tsang studies molecular cell biology and epigenomics, with a focus on liver damage-repair mechanisms and harnessing this regenerative ability to apply it to other terminally differentiated cells. The liver has a remarkable capacity to regenerate through either hepatocytes or ductal cells upon damage. However, aberrant regulation will result in disease.

Tsang’s host lab recently demonstrated that intrahepatic ductal cells undergo major epigenetic remodelling in vivo during ductal-driven liver regeneration and these changes are recapitulated during organoid initiation, which underscores the potential of using organoids to understand liver regeneration. Nevertheless, the regulatory mechanisms that dictate the activation and termination of the regenerative programs remain largely unknown. It is also unclear whether the heterogenous ductal population shares similar regenerative potential and how the intrinsic differences contribute to the regenerative programs.

Tsang is studying the epigenetic mechanisms that control the change of cellular plasticity in ductal cells during liver regeneration. He is combining ductal organoids, in vivo mouse models and single-cell multi-omics approaches, to identify key regulators, as well as intrinsic heterogeneity that could alter the regeneration program. Unravelling liver damage-repair mechanisms helps harness the regenerative ability of the liver and pave the way to confer the proliferative capacity to other terminally differentiated cells.

Biography

Long Hin Tsang is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He received his MSc in Human Biology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a BSc in Biochemistry from The University of Hong Kong. He has previously been awarded the LMU@Lehre Student Research Award and was on the Dean's Honour List at HKU.