Juan Du, Ph.D.

Research

The Du lab investigates how the human body senses and regulates temperature through neuronal ion channels and receptors. Temperature is an omnipresent yet invisible stimulus that shapes how we perceive our environment, maintain homeostasis, and respond to disease. Despite its fundamental importance, how different temperatures are perceived and how they influence protein structure and function remain underexplored in biomedical science. Our research addresses this gap by studying proteins at various temperatures. Our lab has pioneered temperature-resolved structural and functional analyses of sensory ion channels and revealed that temperature profoundly influences protein dynamics and drug-binding landscapes. Our long-term goal is to identify molecular sensors that distinguish between different temperature ranges, develop pharmacological tools to modulate temperature sensing, and establish a comprehensive framework linking temperature-dependent protein dynamics to physiology and disease.

As an Innovation Fund investigator, Juan Du, Ph.D., is teaming up with Marco Gallio, Ph.D., to study the molecular and structural changes by which an ion channel that initially functioned as a bitter receptor in Drosophila became repurposed over time as a dedicated heat sensor—and continued to evolve as the species adapted to different thermal habitats. This work combines the Du lab’s expertise in structural biology with the Gallio lab’s extensive experience in neurogenetics and neurophysiology. Together, the investigators aim to uncover how a receptor could be co-opted to sense a completely different stimulus and how species-specific properties evolve to match environmental demands. They hope to define how evolution repurposes molecular components to create new sensory receptors, offer structural insight into a fundamentally new class of thermosensors, and establish a framework to understand how temperature is detected at the molecular and cellular level to drive species-specific behaviors.