Phuong Chung

My main focus in the lab is anatomy and confocal microscopy.  I joined Julie Simpson’s lab in August of 2006.  My first project was to do an anatomical screen of Julie’s enhancer trap GAL4 collection (about 500 lines.)  This screen consisted of doing genetic crosses, adult brain and thorax dissection, antibody staining, mounting, and imaging.  I also did two more anatomical screens for Andrew Seeds, a post-doc in the lab.  These collections were the waffles and LexAV and LexAP hops lines (approximately 300 lines.)  Along with these anatomical screens, I tried to optimize the staining protocol to get the best quality images possible for automated alignment (in collaboration with Hanchuan Peng and Gene Myers).I am also responsible for testing the many tools that are developed in the lab to help narrow down the neurons responsible for specific behaviors.  This includes the GAL80 collections, effectors, and LexA reagents.  One of these tools is the Brainbow, which is in collaboration with Stefanie Hampel, a research specialist in the lab.  For the dBrainbow project, I tested for endogenous signals of many different single fluorescent proteins and combined constructs.  In addition, I optimized the conditions for the epitope tags, the staining for the different dBrainbow constructs, and testing many Cre lines.  dBrainbow is now published in Nature Methods.  Education2001:  Bachelor of Arts in BioChemistry from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania2001-2003:  Lab Technician at Biomol Research Laboratory in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania2003-2006:  Research Assistant in Chi-Hon Lee’s lab in NICHD of the NIH in Bethesda, MD