Lab Members - YONG-XIN LI'S LAB

Jing Liu Postdoc

Jing Liu obtained her Master's degree in 2017 and Ph.D. degree in 2021 from Ocean University of China. Her previous research mainly focused on the discovery and functional study of novel secondary metabolite biosynthetic elements of marine-derived Streptomyces. She joined this group in May 2021. She is interested in discovering the novel enzymatic mechanism in the molecular assembly process of natural products that have the potential to become drugs, and revealing their biosynthetic pathways and regulatory mechanisms.

Yongqi Tian Postdoc

Yongqi Tian earned his Ph.D. in marine drug discovery from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2016. He worked as an Associate Professor at Fuzhou University before he joined this group in Oct 2022. His previous research focused on bioactive natural product discovery from medicinal plants or foods. He is interested in genome mining-guided discovery of novel natural products from rare microorganisms and revealing their biosynthetic mechanism.

Beibei He PhD Student

Beibei He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Jiangnan University and then moved to Shanghai Jiao Tong University to pursue his Master's degree, during which he mainly focused on natural products (NPs) biosynthesis. His interests are illustrating enzymatic mechanisms in NPs biosynthesis and harnessing the power of those enzymes for pathway bioengineering. He joined this group in 2019 to work at the discovery of novel peptide antibiotics from the microbiome powered by the combinational use of synthetic biology and metagenome mining.
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Jian Zhang PhD Student

Zhang Jian received her Bachelor's degree from Southwest University and her Master's degree from Sichuan University. Her previous research mainly focused on the metabolomic analysis of Bile Acids in human biological samples (urine, feces, and serum). She joined this group since 2019 and tries to apply multi-omics approaches to guide the discovery of new antibiotics from the ocean and human microbiome.

Peiyan Cai PhD Student

Peiyan Cai received her Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology from Nankai University in 2019. Her research focuses on natural product discovery and synthetic biology. Thanks to the platform of iGEM, she started to get in touch with synthetic biology and was deeply attracted by the power of synthetic biology in drug discovery. She wants to apply synthetic biology strategies to convert the genetic potential hidden in the microbiome into chemical realty for drug discovery.

Zheng Zhong PhD Student

Zheng Zhong earned his Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and Mphil degree in Marine Environmental Science from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He had been working in big data genome mining guided discovery of natural products in HKUST. He joined HKU with Dr. Li as his first Ph.D. student in 2019. His research interest is uncovering novel natural products by several bioinformatics approaches. He is currently working on integrating deep learning with traditional genome mining approaches for novel antibiotic discovery.

Ying Gao PhD Student

Ying Gao obtained her Bachelor's degree in Food Science and Engineering from Huazhong Agricultural University. She had been working on computational chemistry for two years before she joined this group in 2020. She wants to introduce deep learning into genome mining for the targeted discovery of natural products from ocean microbiome.

Zhiman Song PhD Student

Zhiman Song received her bachelors’ and masters’ degrees from Shenzhen University, during which she mainly focused on discovering novel bioactive natural products (NPs) from mangrove-associated microbes. She is interested in big data genome mining-guided discovery of NPs. She joined Li’s group in 2021 to discover novel antibiotics from marine microbes and investigate their biosynthesis.

Dengwei Zhang PhD Student

Dengwei received his Bachelor's degree, as well as Master's degree of biochemistry and molecular biology from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). During his master studies at UESTC, he focused on developing enhanced plant genome editing tools based on CRISPR/Cas9 technology. After graduated, he has worked at BGI for 3 years, during which he mainly worked on establishing a genome editing platform for orchids as well as mining novel CRSIPR systems. Prior to joining this group, he has another one year of experience in metagenomic research at School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong. He joined this group in July 2021, and maintained his interests in relating pathogenic molecular to human diseases by leveraging multi-omics approaches.

Zhuo Cheng PhD Student

Zhuo Cheng obtained her Bachelor's degree in Huazhong Agricultural University and master's degree in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, during which she mainly focused on lanthipeptide biosynthesis. She joined this group in 2020 to work on the discovery and biosynthesis of novel Ribosomally and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs).

Yuqi Shi PhD Student

Yuqi Shi received her Bachelor's degree from Shenyang Pharmaceutical University and her Master's degree from Lanzhou University. Her previous research mainly focused on the bioassay-guided discovery of natural products. She joined this group in September 2022 and wants to combine bioinformatics and biological evaluations to discover bioactive peptides from the human microbiome.

Nanzhu Chen MPhil Student

Nanzhu Chen obtained his Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology Engineering from South China University of Technology (SCUT) in 2019. After he graduated from SCUT, he worked as a Research Assistant in Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology for one year, during which he mainly focused on the surface display of enzymes on Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He joined this group since October 2020. His interests are development of molecular and genetic tools in synthetic biology and their application in natural products discovery.

Runze Liu MPhil Student

Runze Liu obtained his bachelor’s degree from Northwest A&F university in 2022. He engaged in natural product discovery and joined the group as a Mphil student in September 2022. He is interested in synthetic biology and genome mining and wants to learn more about natural product biosynthesis.

Gengfan Wu MPhil Student

Gengfan WU obtained his bachelor's degree from Sun Yat-Sen University, during which he mainly focused on Computer-Aided Drug Design. He joined the group as a Mphil student in September 2022 and is interested in protein design and bioengineering.

Qianlin Zhuo Undergraduate Student

Qianlin Zhuo is doing her bachelor's degree in the Faculty of Science at HKU. She is double majoring in Biochemistry and Neuroscience. Her interests are genomics-guided drug discovery, especially in neuron-related drugs.

Jing Liu ​Postdoc