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Professor Xiaolei Xu
Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Mayo Clinic College of Medicine
Rochester, MN
Speaker Biography
Xiaolei Xu is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Roches-ter, MN. He directs the Zebrafish Genetics Laboratory at Mayo Clinic, where he and his colleagues study cardi-ac diseases using zebrafish as a vertebrate model. Dr. Xu's lab generated the first embryonic and adult zebrafish models for cardiomyopathies. Through collaborating with Drs Tzung Hsiai at UCLA, Hung Cao at UCI, and Pieter de Tombe at Loyola University, they have been actively developing and implementing new technologies including light sheet microscopy, ECG, high frequency echocardiography and Langendorff-like system that are critical for reliably phenotyping pathogenesis in this new animal model with a tiny heart. Taking advantage of the unique genetic power of zebrafish, they collaborated with Dr. Steve Ekker and successfully developed a mutagenesis screen-based strategy for systematically discovery of genetic modifiers. Importantly, they showed that some of these modifiers could be therapeutic targets for cardiomyopathy. They also established collabora-tion with Dr. Joerg Herrmann, a cardiologist and the Director of Cardio-oncology at Mayo Clinic, and started a clinical trial for FDA-approved drugs identified from their screen in zebrafish.
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