Xiao-Ping Liu
Scientist II
Xiao-Ping Liu joined the Allen Institute in 2022, where she is currently a member of the Human Cell Types team. She performs quantitative analysis on and tries to derive insight from patch-seq data, which provide multimodal scRNA-seq, electrophysiological, and morphological characterization of neuronal cells throughout the nervous system. Previously, she has studied processing of complex stimuli by neurons in the auditory cortex in the lab of Xiaoqin Wang, as well as mechanotransduction and electrophysiological maturation of hair cells in the lab of Jeff Holt and Gwen Geleoc. She completed her Ph.D. in the joint Harvard/MIT Health Sciences Technology program, studying ion channels of inner ear sensory neurons in the lab of Ruth Anne Eatock. She is passionate about linking the biology of neurons to their function, and incorporating diverse experimental tools and modeling to help bridge this gap.
research focus
Xiao-Ping is contributing to the annotation of comprehensive cell-type taxonomies in primates through the incorporation of patch-seq data, with a focus on the basal ganglia and cerebral cortex. Annotation of these community resources will provide a richer picture of the phenotypes of transcriptomically identified cell types. Cross-species comparisons of patch-seq data will provide further insight into conservation and specialization in primates and humans, and provide a better roadmap for the development of treatments for neurological disorders.
