Our laboratory is affiliated to the School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University, and is also the part of the Center for Life Sciences of Tsinghua and Peking University, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Structural Biology, Bioinformatics Division and Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology.

Our research focuses on cross-disciplinary fields such as structural biology, genomics, machine learning, and big data analytics. Our main Research Interests is to develop and use a combination of computational and experimental methods to interpret the structural and functional relationships of biological macromolecules (eg, proteins, RNA, DNA) and to reconstruct their interaction networks, and discover the mechanisms and possible treatments for complex diseases that are associated with structural changes in proteins and RNA and abnormalities in macromolecular interactions( including cancer and infectious diseases) by combining structural biology and systems biology. We have unique protein and RNA structure modeling and next-generation sequencing-based RNA structure measurements, and high-throughput RNA-protein interaction detection technologies, as well as powerful computational and experimental platforms to advance our research.

Main interest:

1. Analyze the structure of biological macromolecules, in particular, detect RNA secondary structure using high-throughput deep sequencing and use machine learning methods to predict and model RNA secondary structure; explain the structural and functional relationship on this basis, especially machine learning methods that effectively predict or discover protein functional sites, RNA functional motifs, etc.;

2. Develop methods based on high-throughput experiments and structural modeling to reconstruct biological macromolecules such as protein-protein, RNA-RNA, and protein-RNA interaction networks;

3. In particular, Combining sequence and structural analysis to study its phylogenetic and functional classification for long non-coding RNA (lncRNA);

4. Combining the structural and molecular interaction networks of RNA and proteins to study the molecular mechanisms and possible therapeutic approaches of RNA virus invading cells and causing infectious diseases;

5. Discover the mechanisms by which genomic mutations cause protein and RNA folding errors and interaction network disorders, as well as the diagnosis, prognosis, and possible treatments for complex diseases, including cancer, in combination with structural and network development.