Biography
Researcher at the College of Future Technology, Peking University. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Science from Peking University in 2009. He conducted research on complex diseases at NIH in the USA and established his lab at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Peking University in 2011. His lab uses rhesus monkeys as a model to explore the molecular basis of human brain-specific development, focusing on multi-omics data mining, machine learning algorithm development, new model establishment, and mechanism discovery. He has overcome several technical bottlenecks in rhesus monkey research, laying a foundation for precise evolutionary and mechanistic studies using human-like models. His research has accurately identified human-specific new genes and regulatory elements, proposing new models to explore their origins and evolutionary patterns, and elucidated new mechanisms by which these new genes and regulatory elements enhance brain size and cognitive functions. He has published 21 papers as a corresponding author in journals such as Nature Ecology & Evolution, Science Advances, PNAS, and Genome Biology. His work has been praised for its innovation by Science, and his models have been widely recognized by peers. He has received support from the "Ten Thousand Talents Program" for Young Top-notch Talent (2014), the Excellent Young Scientists Fund from NSFC (2015), and has won the Beishizhang Young Biophysicist Award. He has guided Ph.D. students to win the Wu Rui Award.
Representative achievement
1. Wanqiu Ding, Xiangshang Li, Jie Zhang, Mingjun Ji, Mengling Zhang, Xiaoming Zhong, Yong Cao, Chunqiong Li, Xiaoge Liu, Chunfu Xiao, Ting Li, Qing Yu, Fan Mo, Boya Zhang, Jianhuan Qi, Jie-Chun Yang, Jiaxin Wang, Juntian Qi, Lu Tian, Xinwei Xu, Qi Peng, Wei-Zhen Zhou, Zhijin Liu, Aisi Fu, Ni A. An, Xiuqing Zhang, Jian-Jun Zhang, Baoyang Hu, Yujie Sun, Li Zhang# and Chuan-Yun Li#, Adaptive Structural Variants Encode Human Uniqueness in Brain Developments, Science Advances, 2024.
2. Jie Zhang, Qi Peng, Chengchuan Ma, Chunfu Xiao, Ting Li, Xiaoge Liu, Liankui Zhou, Wei-Zhen Zhou, Wanqiu Ding, Ni A. An, Ying Liu# and Chuan-Yun Li# 6mA-Sniper: Quantifying 6mA Sites in Eukaryotes at Single-Nucleotide Resolution, Science Advances, 2023.
3. Ni A. An, Jie Zhang, Fan Mo, Xuke Luan, Qing Sunny Shen, Xiangshang Li, Chunqiong Li, Lu Tian, Boya Zhang, Juntian Qi, Mingjun Ji, Jianhuan Qi, Wei-Zhen Zhou, Wanqiu Ding, Li Zhang, Jia-Yu Chen, Shaokun Shu, Baoyang Hu# and Chuan-Yun Li#, Human-specific genes with an lncRNA origin encode unique human brain developmental functionality, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2023 (Featured by Science, Nature Ecology & Evolution).
4. Ni A. An, Wanqiu Ding, Xin-Zhuang Yang, Jiguang Peng, Bin Z. He, Qing Sunny Shen, Fujian Lu, Aibin He, Yong E. Zhang, Bertrand Chin-Ming Tan, Jia-Yu Chen# and Chuan-Yun Li#, Evolutionarily Significant A-to-I RNA Editing Events Originated through G-to-A Mutations in Primates, Genome Biology, 2019.
5. Yumei Li, Chen Li, Shuxian Li, Qi Peng, Ni A. An, Aibin He# and Chuan-Yun Li#, Human Exonization through Differential Nucleosome Occupancy, PNAS, 2018.
