Dr. Ming Tian

For his undergraduate biochemistry major, Ming Tian attended Beijing University - the most prestigious school in his native China. For his biochemistry PhD, Tian attended Harvard University - the most prestigious university in the United States.

“Harvard was a great experience,” he says. “It was pretty difficult in the beginning, but after a while I got used to it.”

For his PhD project, Tian researched the mechanism by which alternative RNA splicing is regulated in fruit fly development.

Tian’s post doctorate was spent at Children’s Hospital in Boston where he began immunology research. It provided a dramatically different research environment than he’d previously experienced. “In my PhD I did purely biochemistry work, which is in a test tube, but at Children’s I was working with mice,” he says. “It took me a while to get up to speed and know the field and the technique, but eventually it paid off.” Having experienced both types of research allows Tian to approach experimental problems in a variety of ways.

For the two years he’s taught at UT, Tian has worked on affinity maturation, the process by which one’s immune response to antigens becomes stronger with repeated exposure because of tighter antigen binding. Tian focuses on B cell lymphocytes. They possess an enzyme that makes gene mutations, which become antibodies. Some of these mutations bind more tightly to the antigen, making them better antibodies. Tian says this process is “a double-edged sword“ because the antigen-making enzyme can also make negative mutations in other parts of the genome if not properly regulated and directed. This can cause cancer.

“I’m trying to understand how the B cell directs the mutators to the right place to do the right thing by making better antibodies without messing up the genome,” Tian says. “B-cell lymphoma is a prevalent form of human cancer. The majority of human lymphoma comes from B cells. I’m trying to figure out how the cell minimizes this danger”.

The students in Tian’s lab use tissue culture cells instead of animals because the cells are more convenient, and results are more quickly obtained. For the first two years of his students’ graduate school careers, Tian spends much time giving them detailed instructions on how to improve their research technique. “It takes a couple of years for new students to really get a sense of what a project is about so they can independently design experiments,” he says.

Each week, Tian has his students pick a scholarly paper to discuss. “It’s important for students to learn how to critically examine published papers because not all of them are perfect,” he says. “It’s like a journal club, but is more directed toward what we are interested in.”

The vast biochemistry knowledge not yet discovered is what keeps Tian interested. He notes that biochemistry and molecular biology research only “took off” in the 1980’s when technology finally became available allowing researchers to “probe a lot of problems.“ Because of this, there remain many open questions needing to be addressed. One prominent example is the need for a cancer cure.
“We’ve learned a lot about how cancer happens,” Tian says. but what we don’t yet know is how to fix it once it does happen.”
Tian believes communication between researchers and medical clinicians needs improvement. The professions have traditionally been very separate because “it’s hard to be good at both.” Though he hasn’t yet collaborated with medical personnel, Tian hopes to when his research is more established. “I want to make a more direct impact on curing disease,” he says. “I want to see direct effects of my research rather than it being abstract.”