Dr. Cheng’s mouse lens epithelial cells image is featured on vectorslabs.com as a festive holiday wreath. Happy holidays from the Cheng Lab, and wishing everyone a bright and wonderful 2021!

The Cheng lab is looking for a talented post-doctoral research fellow to join our eye lens research team.

Applicants must have a Ph.D. by the start date of the job.

More details can be found at: https://indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/10154.

Inquiries can be sent to Dr. Cheng at ckcheng@iu.edu.

Research Associate Post Doc Ad Cheng 2020

The Cheng Lab is hiring! We are looking for an enthusiastic individual to join our team as a part-time or full-time lab technician in early 2021. The lab is funded by a NIH R01 grant through 2025.

Learn more about the position at the links below or through jobs.iu.edu (job IDs: 292775 and 292773)!

If you have any questions, feel free to email any member of our lab!

https://hrms.indiana.edu/psc/PH1PRD_PUB/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM_FL.HRS_CG_SEARCH_FL.GBL?Page=HRS_APP_SCHJOB_FL&Action=U

https://hrms.indiana.edu/psc/PH1PRD_PUB/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM_FL.HRS_CG_SEARCH_FL.GBL?Page=HRS_APP_SCHJOB_FL&Action=U

If you missed Dr. Cheng’s Oxyopia talk on Friday, she is presenting her research again this week for the vision science seminar at the College of Optometry at The Ohio State University.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, November 10^th at 12:00 PM EST

https://osu.zoom.us/j/96058296080?pwd=MC9XNTdjMWQwcDVUN3V2dDdVTmxzZz09

Meeting ID: 960 5829 6080

Password: 523239

Please contact us if you have any questions!

The next Oxyopia talk will be from our very own Dr. Catherine Cheng, Assistant Professor at Indiana University School of Optometry.

To attend the event, follow this link: https://iu.zoom.us/j/97860483446

Please email Dr. Cheng for the password: ckcheng@iu.edu

Title: The Eye Lens In Focus: Normal Aging and Age-related Pathologies

Abstract:  The eye lens is an avascular, transparent, highly refractive and biconvex structure that fine focuses light images onto the retina, and the function of the lens is intimately tied to its shape, biomechanical properties, transparency and refractive index. Age-related changes lead to two major lens pathologies, cataracts and presbyopia. Cataracts, defined as any lens opacity, remain the leading cause of blindness in the world, and presbyopia is caused by a reduction in the lens’ ability to change shape during focusing (accommodation), and, by extension, the need for reading glasses. The WHO estimates that there are at least 1 billion people globally with unaddressed visual impairment, including 65.2 million people with cataracts and 826 million people with presbyopia. The leading cause of visual impairment is aging. Decades of study have focused on lens development and congenital cataracts, but very little is known about morphological, mechanical, refractive and cellular changes that occur with advanced age in the lens.

In this talk, I will share the results of a comprehensive study of young and very old wild-type mouse lenses, including measurements of lens size, stiffness, refractive index, transparency and cell structure. These results revealed surprising information about the causes of age-related opacities and the relationship between lens size and stiffness. These data are a baseline for continued studies of lens aging in disease models. My lab is currently investigating the effects of aging in lenses with disruptions to Eph-ephrin bidirectional signaling. Ephs are the largest class of receptor tyrosine kinases and are stimulated by a class of ligands known as ephrins. Human and mouse mutations in EphA2 and ephrin-A5 lead to congenital and age-related cataracts. I will demonstrate that Eph-ephrin signaling is not only crucial for lens transparency, but also influences lens biomechanical properties. I will also outline new experiments to probe the roles of Eph-ephrin signaling in lens aging.

Congratulations to the Lachke lab at the University of Delaware on their new HMG paper investigating the function of RNA-granule component TDRD7 in the eye lens! We helped examine the change in lens fiber cell morphology caused by loss of TDRD7.

Check out the paper at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32420594/

Congratulations to our own Jessica Palmer for winning the Student Innovator Award at IUSO this past Friday!

This award was sponsored by MyEyeDr and Jobson’s Rick Bay Foundation for Excellence in Eyecare Education.

We just completed a multi-year, multi-lab aging study on the eye lens. Check out our results at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31844034

Vector Laboratories 2020 wall calendars are in! Photos from our lab are displayed for the months of August and October. Check it out: https://vectorlabs.com

We are pleased to announce a new member of our laboratory team – Edyth McEvilly. She will be working as a laboratory technician and manager. We are excited to begin working with you!