April Research Rounds
PRiME Research Rounds is a monthly research presentation featuring talks from PRiME Principal Investigators and Fellows. The seminar sessions bring the PRiME community together for engaging discussions!
Date: Friday, April 17, 2026, 1:00 - 2:00PM (Light refreshments will be provided)
Location: Red Seminar Room, Terrence Donnelly Centre, 160 College Street
Speakers:
Mike Tyers
Senior Scientist, Program in Molecular Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children
Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto
"Make the microbes do it: in situ biosynthesis and delivery of designed therapeutics in the GI tract"
Yuxi Xiao
Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025 PRiME Fellow
University of Toronto & The Hospital for Sick Children
"Decoding the disorder: Synthetic disordered protein design"
Yuxi Xiao is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto. She earned her PhD in Molecular Genetics from the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, as a direct-entry student supported by a merit entrance scholarship. She completed her undergraduate studies at Zhejiang University, graduating with a Chu Kochen Honours Degree (top one percent).
Her research combines evolutionary analysis with high-throughput approaches, including genome-wide CRISPR screens, proteomics, and high-content imaging, to study how biomolecular condensates mediate cellular stress responses. During her PhD, she discovered a conserved condensate that regulates cellular homeostasis under osmotic stress, providing mechanistic insights into WNK kinase regulation and condensate-mediated signaling. She now focuses on intrinsically disordered protein regions, generating large-scale data to guide synthetic design of disordered sequences and predict their function in stress-responsive condensates.