Amy YangScience
Neuroscience research
I've always been fascinated by our bodies. We're all made of the same things, yet no two of us are alike. What is it about our bodies, and especially our brains, that makes us so different?
- Led the lab's move to split-pool single-cell RNA-seq to detect splicing defects, including cryptic exon inclusion, at read-level resolution. Trained three collaborating labs on the protocol.
- Optimized a whole-neuron isolation protocol for postmortem human brain. Sorted neurons with stage-specific tau antibodies across six samples to profile transcriptomic changes across stages of tau pathology.
- Nanopore library prep and adaptive sampling to size and clinically classify C9orf72 repeat expansions in ALS and FTD.
- Built pipelines for single-cell mitochondrial DNA heteroplasmy lineage tracing in CD45+ cells, allele-specific and differential expression in bulk RNA-seq, and somatic mutation and copy-number profiling in cell-type-specific Alzheimer's datasets.
- Dissected Drosophila brains and used immunohistochemistry to label neuronal populations for neural plasticity studies.
- Confocal imaging of labeled pathways, analyzed in napari to map circuit connectivity.
- Set up genetic crosses and maintained fly stocks.
- Set up and ran cycle sequencing reactions on ABI 3730XL analyzers for researchers across campus.
- High-throughput nucleic acid purification with magnetic-bead chemistry on Beckman Coulter workstations.
- Engineered enhanced function into immune cells on Caribou's iPSC and NK-cell gene editing platform.
- Cultured cell lines, primary immune cells, and iPSCs. Ran nucleofection, flow cytometry, and functional assays.
Output
Publications and presentations
Lee, S., Hamdan, Z., Huntress, S. S., Yang, A., and Guo, M. "A large-scale single cell map of primary and conditional regulatory variation in the human brain."
medRxiv (2026). doi:10.64898/2026.05.30.26354534
Yang, A. and Guo, M. "Applying Split-Pool Combinatorial Barcoding to Dissect Transcriptional Changes in Neurodegenerative Diseases."
Poster, University of Pennsylvania Institute on Aging Symposium, Philadelphia, PA (2025).