Vikki Weake

Title:

Professor

PhD Granting Institution:

Massey University, New Zealand

Contact:

Email Address: vweake@purdue.edu
Office Phone: 765-496-1730
Lab Website Link: https://ag.purdue.edu/department/biochem/labs/weake-lab/index.html

Primary Training Group:

Integrative Neuroscience

Secondary Training Groups:

Computational and Systems Biology

Research Areas:

The mechanisms that govern how and when genes are expressed control our development, and also influence how our cells age. Studying these mechanisms can help us understand how aging contributes to ocular diseases such as age-related macular degeneration. Our work is funded by the National Eye Institute of the NIH and by the National Science Foundation.

Current Projects:

1) Redox regulation of phototransduction - Drosophila 2) Chromatin connects metabolism to circadian gene regulation in the aging eye - Drosophila 3) The epigenome-metabolism nexus as a driver of circadian disruption in Alzheimer's disease - Drosophila 4) Targeting circadian dysregulation to treat age-related ocular disease - mouse spatial and single cell RNA-seq analysis

Importance of Interdisciplinary Research:

Our work uses a combination of biochemical, genetic, computational, and imaging approaches. Students in the lab work primary at the bench, but often also learn bioinformatics analysis approaches relevant to their own project. Our lab collaborates with other groups at Purdue and beyond for structural analysis, enzyme kinetic studies, mouse retina analysis, and electrophysiology work.