Chuan He

Chuan He () is a Chinese-American chemical biologist, and is currently the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is best known for his work in discovering and deciphering reversible RNA methylation in post-transcriptional gene expression regulation.

Education

He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1994 with a B.S. in Chemistry. After his Ph.D. training with Stephen J. Lippard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked under Gregory L. Verdine as a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He became a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago in 2002.

Research

In 2010, He proposed that RNA modifications could be reversible and may have regulatory roles analogous to well-known reversible DNA and protein modifications. He and colleagues subsequently discovered the first RNA demethylase that oxidatively reverses N6-methyladenosine (m⁶A) methylation in mammalian messenger RNA (mRNA) in 2011. The existence of m⁶A in mRNA was discovered in 1974 in both eukaryotic and viral mRNAs; however, the biological significance and functional role were not known before He’s work. This methylation is the most abundant internal modification in mammalian mRNA. In 2012, two independent studies reported transcriptome-wide mapping of m⁶A in mammalian cells and tissues, revealing a unique distribution pattern. He and co-workers identified and characterized the direct reader proteins for m⁶A, which impact the stability and the translation efficiency of m⁶A-modified mRNA, elucidating functional roles of mRNA methylation. His group also purified the methyltransferase complex that mediates this methylation.

The He laboratory also studies DNA methylation. He invented TAB-seq, a method that can map 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) at base-resolution genome-wide, as well as hmC-Seal, a method that covalently labels 5hmC for its detection and profiling. Together with two other research groups, He and co-workers have revealed the DNA ''N⁶''-methyldeoxyadenosine as a new methylation mark that could affect gene expression in eukaryotes.

Honors and awards

* 2003: Searle Scholar Award
* 2005: Beckman Young Investigators Award
* 2017: Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research
* 2019: ACS Chemical Biology Lectureship
* 2023: Wolf Prize in ChemistryWolf Prize in Chemistry 2023
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References

External links

He Lab at The University of Chicago

{{DEFAULTSORT:He, Chuan
1972 births
Living people
Howard Hughes Medical Investigators
University of Chicago faculty
Chemists from Guizhou
Chinese biochemists
American biochemists
Educators from Guizhou
Chinese emigrants to the United States
American geneticists
Chinese geneticists
University of Science and Technology of China alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Harvard University staff
Biologists from Guizhou