Alexey Terskikh, PhD

Alexey Terskikh, PhD

Professor

Alexey received his PhD in molecular immunology from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) working with Prof. Jean-Pierre Mach. As a postdoctoral fellow with Irv Weissman at Stanford, he discovered common mechanisms between hematopoietic and neural stem cells and developed the Fluorescent Timer protein. Alexey held Assistant and Associate Profesor positions at Sanford Burnham Prebys, where he explored molecular mechanisms of self-renewal and neuronal differentiation of neural stem cells and discovered a dual role of SOX2 in neural stem and progenitor cells, including an epigenetic mechanism of proneural gene activation. We discovered that Zika virus protease could bind single-stranded and proposed a “reverse inchworm” model for a tightly intertwined NS2B-NS3 helicase-protease machinery.

We discovered that patterns of epigenetic marks in the nucleus can identify cellular states and developed a novel technique: microscopic imaging of epigenetic landscapes (MIEL). Furthermore, we discovered that image-based chromatin and epigenetic age (ImAge) capture intrinsic age-related progressions (trajectories) of the spatial organization of chromatin and epigenetic marks in single nuclei.