Gang Chen, PhD

Lab Head

Gang Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen

Pronouns: he/him

Dr Gang CHEN is an Associate Professor in the School of Life and Health Sciences (LHS), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen). He received his B.S. degree in Chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2001. He did his Ph.D. studies with Prof. Douglas TURNER in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester. His Ph.D. work involved thermodynamic and NMR studies of RNA internal loops. A better understanding of the sequence dependence of thermodynamics for RNA structures will improve the accuracy of the RNA secondary structure prediction programs such as MFOLD and RNAstructure. He earned his Ph.D. in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Ignacio TINOCO’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley from January 2006 to June 2009. His research in TINOCO lab was on single-molecule mechanical unfolding and folding of RNA pseudoknots by laser optical tweezers, which provided new insights into ribosomal reading-frame regulation by cis-acting mRNA structures. He was a Research Associate in Prof. David MILLAR's lab in the Department of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute working on HIV-1 Rev-RRE assembly using single-molecule fluorescence techniques. In July 2010, he joined the faculty in the Division of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He joined LHS at CUHK-Shenzhen in 2020.

His team has been focused on (1) using biophysical and biochemical methods (including single-molecule manipulation using high-resolution optical tweezers) for probing the molecular interactions accounting for the structures, stabilities, dynamics, and functions of RNAs and RNA-ligand complexes; and (2) developing RNA structure-targeting programmable chemically modified peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) and other functional molecules as chemical probes, diagnostic tools, and therapeutic drugs. The team’s high-impact research on targeting RNA duplexes has generated significant interests in the RNA community. The team has been invited to contribute to (1) a review article on RNA triplexes in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: RNA, (2) a book chapter (published by Springer) on recognition and targeting of mature miRNA and miRNA hairpin precursor by duplex and triplex formation, respectively, (3) a methods article for the Journal of Visualized Experiments on sequence-specific and selective recognition of double-stranded RNAs over single-stranded RNAs by chemically modified peptide nucleic acids, (4) a News & Views article for the journal Nature Chemical Biology on the importance of base triples, junctions, and other non-Watson-Crick interactions in facilitating catalytic reactions of an RNA enzyme, and (5) an article in the Future of Biochemistry special issue in the journal Biochemistry (invited by the Editor-In-Chief, Prof Alanna Schepartz). The interdisciplinary team welcomes talents to join us to probe and target RNA sequences and structures with the ultimate goals of developing modern biological tools, disease diagnosis methods, and precision medicines.