Fang Xiangdong

Biography

Dr. FANG Xiangdong is currently a professor of Beijing Institute for Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Dr. FANG started his scientific career since 1992 when he received his M.D. degree from Nanfang Medical University in Guangzhou, China. After 5-years professional training at the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology leaded by Dr. CHI Chengwu, the Academician of CAS, in the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology in CAS in Shanghai, Dr. FANG received his Master degree in Immunology in 1995 and Ph.D. degree in Anatomy and Histology and Embryology in 1999.   Dr. FANG continued his postdoctoral research in the Division of Medical Genetics in the Medical School at University of Washington (Seattle, WA, USA) from 2000 to 2003. He was promoted to Instructor in 2003 and Research Assistant Professor in Medicine in 2007. When he worked in the Dr. George Stamatoyannopoulos’s lab, Dr. FANG developed the methods named chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and chromatin conformation capture (3C) assay by adapting the real-time PCR method. These quantitative methods are two of the most important epigenetic techniques to study protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions in vivo.   Dr. FANG’s works focus on the epigenetic regulation in the eukaryocyte and high-throughput epigenetic techniques based on next-generation sequencing platform. Dr. FANG’s works had provided major insights about the role of some important trans-factors and cis-elements in globin gene regulation. The mutations impair recruitment of TBP, TFIIB, and Pol II in adult splenic erythroblasts, but not in embryonic erythroid cells (PNAS, 2002 & 2004; J Biol Chem, 2004; Nucleic Acids Res, 2006). High-level transcription of the globin genes requires the enhancement of a distant enhancer, locus control region (LCR) (Blood, 2002; Mol Cell Biol, 2005; J Mol Biol, 2007;J Mol Biol, 2009).

Research Interest

The focus of our current research is to dissect the molecular mechanism controlling stem cell differentiation, hematopoiesis and tumor metastasis. With next-generation sequencing, the biological data deluge imminent both in size and complexity. Meanwhile, a large body of clinical and pharmaceutical data has been accumulated and is urgent to be truly enhanced with molecular pathology, which provides us big opportunities and challenges to achieve our research goals. We will construct the system of biomedical big data standardization, integration, processing and utilization to make the data analysis faster and more accurate, and most importantly to discover clinical biomarkers. By interpreting various omics and clinical data of massive normal and disease samples, we are trying to construct essential interaction networks related to diseases which consist of trans-factors, cis-elements, coding and non-coding RNAs, methylated DNA, post-translational histones, as well as chromatin conformation. Appropriate cell lines and animal models will be used to confirm the hypothesis. Erythroid differentiation of stem cells is chose as normal lineage developmental model for its distinctive stage specificity. Melanoma is chose as carcinoma model for its highly malignant property.