I pursued my Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences at the School of Biomedical Sciences (SBS), CUHK under the supervision of Prof. Zhao Hui starting from 2017. I am grateful for the three-year study, which is the critical starting point of my academic career. After graduation from CUHK, I was employed as a Research Fellow at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences (GIBH-CAS) in 2020, and subsequently as an Associate Professor at the Guangzhou Medical University – GIBH-CAS Joint School of Life Sciences since 2021.

Thanks to the supervision of Prof. Zhao Hui and the scientific training received at SBS, I acquired a lot about development studies. In collaboration with the group of Prof. Lu Xuemei, Kunming Institute of Zoology, CAS, we illustrated the role of H3K4me3 modification in regulating embryonic development and the reproduction barrier through the P53 pathway (Science Advances, 2023). More works about mitochondria in regulating gastrulation of embryonic development and reproduction barrier are still undergoing (unpublished).

Currently, my research work focuses on cell fate determination by mitochondria. We have been trying to decipher the regulation network of mitochondrial transcription during cell differentiation and embryonic development. We demonstrated that phase separation drives the self-assembly of mitochondrial nucleoids and modulates mitochondrial transcription (Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, 2021). Further, we identified a group of TCA enzymes translocated from mitochondria to the nucleus in regulating epigenetics of the pluripotent transformed cells in somatic reprogramming, primed to naïve transition and 2C-like transition (Nature Communications, 2022). More details about transcription regulation in cell differentiation and development are still under-discovered.

Dr. Long Qi (left)