Xue is a postdoc whose research focuses on reproductive biology and development using C. elegans as a model system. Particularly, she studies fertilization and egg activation using forward and reverse genetic methods. She works with sterile mutants that produce sperm that look and behave normally but fail to fertilize the egg. The majority of these mutants affect genes encoding proteins on the surface of the sperm that they think mediate the interaction between the sperm and egg. She also screens for genes that affect the egg, with the goal of identifying proteins on the egg surface that serve as receptors during sperm recognition and adhesion.
During her PhD training, she studied the planar cell polarity signaling in early embryonic development, its interactions with ciliopathy genes, and implications in neurological disorders such as epilepsy. After graduate school, she joined Dr. Richard Lang’s lab and studied functions of atypical opsins in and outside of the retina.