As the semester draws to a close and we step into the new year, the members of LuoLab have once again made remarkable progress and forged valuable experiences in 2024. To review our growth and progress over the past year, LuoLab held an annual report meeting for 2024 on January 21, 2025. The report was organized into sessions according to research themes, with members taking turns to present their progress and achievements on the path of scientific research, sharing their personal growth and their outlook for the future.
Time flies, 2023 has passed in the blink of an eye. LuoLab's annual year-end summary meeting was successfully held on February 3rd, 2024, where the laboratory members reviewed their work progress in 2023 and looked forward to the following 2024. First of all, Dr. Zhang made a summary from the spatio-temporal dynamic regulation of RNA modification and metagenomic and element mining, and shared her gains and insights.
On Jan. 14th, 2023, an annual meeting was held to review our work in the last year and to look forward to the future. This time, we were honored to invite Dr. Feng Guihai, Dr. Jia Xiaoyan, Dr. Xu Jin and Dr. Liu Li as guests to attend the meeting. Their insightful comments and generous advice eminently inspired all of us and were greatly appreciated!
In biological systems, cells precisely regulate gene expression. Individuals inherit genes from both parents, but alleles from different parents often exhibit differences in expression levels or patterns, which is known as Allele-Specific Expression (ASE). ASE may arise from two main causes: first, DNA sequence differences between alleles can affect their ability to bind regulatory elements; second, parent-of-origin effects, for which gene expression depends on whether the allele was inherited from the father or the mother. Genomic imprinting is the most typical example of a parent-of-origin effect, where genes are "imprinted" to express only the paternal or maternal allele. This imbalance in allele expression, caused by sequence differences or parent-of-origin effects (particularly genomic imprinting), is crucial for mammalian processes such as embryonic development, placental formation, growth metabolism, and neurological function. Disruption of this finely tuned regulation, such as abnormal expression of imprinted genes, often leads to severe developmental issues or even embryonic lethality.
On June 2nd, 2025, our lab achieved a significant breakthrough in single-molecule sequencing and RNA epitranscriptomics with our findings, titled “Single-molecule direct RNA sequencing reveals the shaping of epitranscriptome across multiple species”, published in Nature Communications. In this study, we developed a high-precision single-molecule m6A detection tool, SingleMod, based on nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS), and systematically portrayed the m6A single-molecule epitranscriptome across multiple human cell lines and distant species unprecedentedly. This work unveils a series of previously hidden m6A features and evolutionary patterns.
Our lab recently published a research article titled “Comprehensive analysis across mammalian tissues and cells decipher the underlying mechanism of m6A specificity” in RNA. Congratulations to Guo-Shi Chai! This work systematically evaluates 193 published m6A-seq datasets to identify ~1.5 million high-confidence m6A sites in human and mouse, revealing distinct characteristics and functional roles of m6A across different cell lines and tissues.
On Nov. 25th, 2019, Dr. Chun Wang, from China National Rice Research Insititute, gave a lecture about “The Application of Gene Editing Tools in Plant Breeding”.
We are very excited to having Prof. Chuan He here! He gave a talk on the topic of “Reversible DNA and RNA Methylation in Gene Expression Regulation”.