Yang Yungui

Biography

Dr YANG Yungui is a professor at Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Dr YANG received his BS degree in Microbiology from FuDan University in 1995 and PhD degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica/Shanghai Research Center of Biotechnology, CAS in 2000 with professors YANG Shengli and GONG Yi. He performed his postdoctoral research in the laboratories of Dr WANG Zhaoqi (International Agency for Research on Cancer-IARC, 2000-2003) and Dr Tomas Lindahl-2015 Nobel Chemistry Prize Laureate (Clare Hall Laboratories, Cancer Research UK London Research Institute，2005-2008). He had served as a staff scientist at IARC from 2003-2005. His research interest is to dissect the roles and biological significance of epitranscriptomic RNA modifications with particular focus on dynamic RNA methylations (i.e. N6-methyladenosine-m6A).

Research Interest

Our research interests mainly focus on epitranscriptomic regulations and mechanisms of RNA methylation. We have contributed in a breakthrough point of expanding new research frontiers of RNA methylation-mediated epitranscriptomics by identifying the mammalian RNA N6-Methyladenosine (m6A) methyltransferase complex METTL3/METTL14/WTAP (Cell Research 2014), selective mechanism of m6A site (Cell Stem Cell 2015), m6A demethylases FTO (Nature Chemical Biology 2011) and ALKBH5 (Molecular Cell 2013) and regulatory role of m6A in pre-mRNA splicing (Cell Research 2014; Molecular Cell 2016). The discovery of the m6A methyltransferase and demethylases demonstrate that the dynamic and reversible chemical m6A modification on RNA is now considered a novel epitranscriptomic marker of profound biological significance.