Skip to main content

Yi-Rong Peng Laboratory

Retinal Transcriptomics and Vision Research

Decoding the molecular mechanisms underlying retinal development, cell-type specificity, and disease

Dr. Yi-Rong Peng

Yi-Rong Peng, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

  • Departments of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology
  • Jules Stein Eye Institute

Cells are the building blocks of complex biological systems, exhibiting remarkable diversity in the visual system. Understanding how cell types form, connect, and degenerate is fundamental to uncover the mechanisms behind blinding diseases. The Peng lab leverages multi-omics approaches–genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics–to decode genetic programs that define cell-type features, unravel the molecular basis of specialized human vision, and identify key signatures driving degeneration in ocular diseases.

Research Focus Areas:

  • Genetic Regulations of Cell Type Generation and Differentiation
  • Molecular Mechanisms of Circuit Formation and Specialization
  • Cellular and Synaptic Adaptations During Retinal Degeneration
  • Cellular and Circuit Principles of the Aging process in the Visual System

The ultimate goal of our research is to provide a fundamental understanding of circuit formation and degeneration in the visual system and to develop therapeutic strategies to prevent or treat vision loss.

Lab Members

Postdoctoral Scholars

Graduate Students

Undergraduate Students

Recent Publications

Molecular characterization of the sea lamprey retina illuminates the evolutionary origin of retinal cell types

Junqiang Wang, Lin Zhang, Martina Cavallini, Ali Pahlevan, Junwei Sun, Ala Morshedian, …, Yi-Rong Peng, et al.

Nature Communications (2024)

View Publication

Evolutionary and developmental specialization of foveal cell types in the marmoset

Lin Zhang, Martina Cavallini, Junqiang Wang, Ruiqi Xin, Qiangge Zhang, Guoping Feng, Joshua R. Sanes, Yi-Rong Peng

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024)

View Publication

Cell-type specification in the retina: Recent discoveries from transcriptomic approaches

Yi-Rong Peng

Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2023)

View Publication

Encoding of environmental illumination by primate melanopsin neurons

Andreas Liu, Elliott S. Milner, Yi-Rong Peng, Hannah A. Blume, Michael C. Brown, Gregory S. Bryman, et al.

Science (2023)

View Publication