The Horses’ Taming Lab will open sometime 2026 and somewhere beautiful on this planet. Stay tuned!
There are possibly more than 21 million people worldwide whose surnames are latinized as “Ma”. While it can be a wonderful cohort for human geneticists to study as it encompasses people with different ethnicities and culture origins, “The Ma Lab” is not a good choice to name our group for branding reasons.
Han Chinese surname “Mǎ” originally derived from “Mafu”, meaning literally “Horses’ Taming”, which was the name of the fiefdom bestowed to the First Universal Common Ancestor of the Han Chinese Mǎs.
There possibly were some “introgression” events where some Han Chinese “Sima” (“Horse Officials”) people changed their surname to “Mǎ”; however, “Horses’ Taming” is no doubt the most canonical annotation of “Mǎ”.
When thinking about it, Horses’ Taming is a good example of identifying opportunities from biodiversity and translating them into real applications, and that is what we want to achieve in this lab.
Medical genetics
Helping Improve diagnostics for genetic diseases is essential to our mission of bringing about better healthcare. These research projects allow us to quickly align our scientific interests with urgent clinical need and help make real-world impacts. We use human genetics methodologies as well as Deep Mutational Scanning to improve variant interpretation and understand disease mechanisms.
Molecular biotechnologies
We believe that to build new tools, we need to first master the existing ones. Amazing biomedical tools have already been created by our colleagues and we are exciting to wield them to develop better therapies. We contribute to gene therapy development by participating “bench-to-bedside” research projects and we have special interests in gene editing tools and gene therapy delivery methods. Along the way, we aim to address the challenges emerging from real-world applications by further engineering the tools.
Translational evolutionary research
This is the core mission of the lab. Two of the most powerful biomedical tools, PCR and CRISPR, both came from discoveries in biodiversity. Evolution can be deemed “the largest trial-and-error experiment” by far. We want to look for inspiration to improve our understanding of genetic mechanisms and disease causes, and we are eager to find more opportunities for revolutionary tools. For starters, we will focus on understanding the fantastic tissue regeneration abilities in different organisms.
Citizen Science
Good research is powered by good ideas. In this lab, we are enthusiastic about crowdsourcing ideas. We care about biological questions people from different trades are curious about. We want to provide research paradigms and solutions that can mobilize citizen involvement. For starters, we have several initiatives. (1) We are open to requests from clinicians to help solve clinical mysteries. (2) Livestock, with their enormous population sizes, may spontaneously develop genetic diseases that are also found in humans; therefore, we welcome collaborations with veterinarians to establish novel disease models, enhancing disease research while improving animal welfares. (3) We will actively search for opportunities to develop “Biotech for Entertainment” and are open to consulting tasks outsourced by Sci-Fi movie/show teams.
The Horses' Taming Lab 