Research

With a broad spectrum across disciplines in biological and medical sciences, we use state-of-art equipments and approaches of bioinformatics, genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, and biotechnology to address fundamental issues in biology and in areas of medical or other applied science. The excellent research activity conducted by the Department is reflected from the fact that faculty members have collectively attracted research funding from various bodies such as National Science Council and Ministry of Health to an average amount of 20 million New Taiwan Dollars each year.

Focuse

The wide-ranging research interests of faculty members can be categorized in the following areas using various systems such as mammalian cells, yeast, zebra fish, mouse and samples from clinical human subjects. In human genetic diseases, molecular diagnostics, nonsyndromic hearing loss, trinucleotide repeats and cancer biology are the focus of current research. Stem cell technology is presently the core of differential and developmental biology in addition to zebra fish research. The main theme of functional genomics includes proteomics of arginine methylation, promoter identification by bioinformatics and screening of specific phenotypes using C2H2 zinc finger-based gene switches. Basic mechanism of cellular function such as cell cycle, morphogenesis, DNA repair and signaling via NO are the major topics of research. The present emphasis of biotechnology is the detection of toxic molecules of fungus by the development of ELISA-based methodology. The key of physiology research currently includes image analysis of neuron structure and of electrophysiology of ion channel. Recognized by its outstanding research, the faculty members in the Department have published numerous manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. Our faculty members have presented their work at national as well as international conferences and symposiums.