News & Stories

A novel brain-wide genome-editing technology offers immense potential to be translated as a novel long-acting therapeutic treatment for Alzheimer’s patients.

A group of researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Xiamen University has revealed new understandings of how surface ruthenium atoms can improve the hydrogen evolution and oxidation activities of platinum. This discovery opens a new venue for rational design of more advanced catalysts for electrolyzer and fuel cell applications. 

HKUST researchers have unravelled the genomic riddles of the tubeworms that thrive deep in the ocean, paving the way for previously unthinkable biological applications.

A research team led by HKUST's VPRD Prof. Nancy IP has developed a simple yet highly effective Alzheimer’s blood test from Chinese patient data for the first time.

HKUST researchers have uncovered a new gene mutation responsible for a brain vascular disorder which inflicted about 10~30 million people in the world.

A group of researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has uncovered the mechanism of how DNA is being melted to start bacterial gene transcription and how one class of antibiotics inhibits this process – an important way in killing bacteria. This discovery provides useful insight on the development of new antibiotics for bacteria that is antimicrobial resistance.

In a new study, scientists at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have revealed that most T cell epitopes known to be targeted upon natural infection are seemingly unaffected by current SARS-CoV-2 variants. In their latest research, the team compiled and analysed data from 18 immunological studies of T cell responses involving over 850 recovered COVID-19 patients from across four continents who are well-distributed in age, gender, disease severity and blood collection time. They demonstrated that T cells in these patients targeted fragments (epitopes) of almost all of the virus' proteins, including the spike protein that is a main target of many existing vaccines. As an important finding, based on analysis of over 850,000 SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences from around the world, most of these epitopes appeared to be unaffected by the current variants of concern.

It is challenging to analyze proteins at low concentrations, especially for those in a mixture of various conformations such as intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). A research team led by Prof. HUANG Jinqing, Assistant Professor of Department of Chemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has developed optical tweezers-coupled Raman spectroscopy that can directly probe the structural features of alpha-synuclein, an IDP closely linked to Parkinson’s disease, at the physiological concentration by focusing on individual protein molecules.