Ying-Hui Fu

Ying-Hui Fu is a biologist and human geneticist who has made important contributions to understanding the genetics of many neurological disorders. Her lab’s chief discoveries have been to describe Mendelian sleep phenotypes and to identify causative genes and mutations for circadian rhythm sleep schedule and sleep duration behavioral traits in humans. In separate work, her group has characterized interesting genetic forms of demyelinating degenerative disorders. Her work focuses on studying interesting heritable traits in humans, linking them back to changes in DNA, and using animal models, in combination with molecular cellular and biochemical methods, to further explore the mechanisms underlying various phenotypes. Fu is currently a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco where her lab is focusing on studies of human sleep behavioral traits.

Background and education

Early career

In 1980, Fu received a degree in food science from National Chung-Hsing University in Taiwan. In her study of food sciences, she was introduced to biochemistry and microbiology, which led her to study DNA manipulation and its uses in the study of biological function. She then received her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Ohio State University in 1986. She continued to work at Ohio State for three more years in a post-doctoral position studying gene regulation in fungi. During her time at OSU, she cloned numerous genes important for nitrogen and sulfur metabolism in Neurospora. One of these, cys-3, encodes a leucine zipper protein. It was hypothesized that leucine zippers were DNA-binding elements. The first proof of this in living organisms was a mutation in the cys-3 leucine zipper which caused a sulfur metabolism defect. After studying the mutation, she showed that the cys-3 bound to DNA and that the mutation abrogated the DNA-binding.