Research

Recently, the international scientific community announced that “Encyclopedia of DNA Elements" (ENCODE) project has acquired so far the most detailed human genome analysis data, with more than 30 papers published in a series of high level of SCI academic journals including Nature, Science, Genome Research and Genome Biology. ENCODE is considered to make another great progress by the international scientific community after the "Human Genome Project" in life science research. ENCODE research team completed the analyses of the non-coding regions of human genome, and confirmed the functions of 80% of these areas in the human genome. Therefore, genome research will still become a very hot research direction. In the long run, ENCODE project will exhibit its far-reaching positive role to the disease, diagnosis, drug research and development etc.

Since 2009, Dr QU Hongzhu, a member of Prof. FANG Xiangdong’s group, was selected to participate in the international ENCODE project with the collaborators of the laboratory leaded by Dr John A. Stamatoyannopoulis, one of the ENCODE project leaders and the director of the Northwest Reference Epigenome Mapping Center, NIH, and published three representative ENCODE papers in Sep, 2012. Prof. FANG Xiangdong is the principal investigator in Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his group has been cooperating with Department of Genomics of Washington University for many years.

In these published works, Dr QU Hongzhu was responsible for the bioinformatics research, she firstly integrated the interaction between important transcription factor and chromatin DNA with DNA methylation in the paper “Widespread plasticity in CTCF occupancy linked to DNA methylation”, those are two different directions of epigentics research fields. Her research will largely help to understand the relationship between the binding efficiency of CTCF on the chromatin and DNA methylation.

In the paper titled “Systematic Localization of Common Disease-Associated Variation in Regulatory DNA”, Dr QU Hongzhu was responsible for the integration of the epigentics data such as the whole genome DNase I mapping data with the existing GWAS SNPs data. Hence, for the first time, GWAS research was carried out on the epigentics level, which provided us a novel research strategy to uncover the genetic mechanisms of the complex diseases.

By using the next high-throughput sequencing platform, Dr QU Hongzhu and her collaborators completed the whole DNase I Hypersensitive Sites (DHSs) mapping of the human genome of 125 kinds of human cells and tissues, firstly demonstrated the most detailed regulation map of the human genomic DNA, and revealed the correlations of the different levels of epigentis factors including chromatin accessibility, transcription, DNA methylation, sequence-specific transcription factor binding spectrum. This study will help to deeply understand the important meaning of the human genome. The paper titled “The accessible chromatin landscape of the human genome” was published in Nature.

Through the flexible and diverse cooperation pattern, BIG has been so far maintaining the close communication and cooperation with Chicago University, Washington University, University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, and the other international top research institutions, which effectively improved academic research and speed up the young scientists growing.

Contact :  Prof. FANG Xiangdong,

　　　　 Email: fangxd@big.ac.cn,

　　　　 Tell: 86-10-82995408